The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (18 page)

Early farmers also traded with their neighbors and they hunted, fished, visited and quilted with them. Many of the collaborative events were recreational as well as utilitarian. County fairs, started in 1811, gathered people at a distance from town for socializing, agricultural education, and modest sales of farm surplus. Neighbors also provided emotional support. They helped with births, weddings, illnesses and death. Entire families might arrive in the evening and remain overnight. Married children, nephews, aunts, the minister and deacons of the church might all stop by. Residents frequently attended the same church. Furthermore, marriages among townspeople made many neighbors into relatives, reinforcing those bonds. All this intimacy meant that everyone knew their neighbor's home and affairs, inside and out.

Although the record shows that Deaf people participated in this system of broad interdependence, their numbers in many towns were few. In 1850 the average Maine town with Deaf inhabitants had fewer than three Deaf people among 2500 citizens (See "Where Deaf people lived" in Chapter 9); most towns had none. Consequently, to enjoy the company and collaboration of their own kind, and to find a spouse, Deaf people had to leave town to visit or live with Deaf relatives, or move to a town or city with other Deaf people.? The earliest travel was on foot along Indian trails, painfully slow, arduous, and dangerous.8 Most towns were beside the sea or on navigable rivers. In winter, when the rivers froze, travel between towns was rapid by sleigh.9 In warmer weather, the river traffic used canoes, small sailing vessels, flatboats poled along, and later steamboats. With improvement in the roads came wagons and stagecoaches. Finally, after 1835, the railroad arrived.

Everyone who lived in the same household was family: old or young widows, children and stepchildren, elderly grandparents, maiden aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, hired men and hired girls; apprentices, servants; orphans and cousins of all ages. In the 1700s, family and kin connections were at the core of village life. A Connecticut history explains: "All of the families of old timers seemed to be related to each other."10 Thus hearing and Deaf families in this era were extended families: not in the sense that two or more married couples would be found in the same household, but rather that every household was part of a kinship network. The Puritan conception of the ancient Hebrew family allowed marriage between first cousins. The same tradition provided equal shares of inheritance for the children and a double share for the oldest son, thus favoring the bonds of kinship more than those of marriage (though the widow would normally be provided for). The practice of marrying kin-especially first cousin marriage with a blood uncle's daughter-favored strong ties between male kin, and yielded more opportunities for children to be hereditarily Deaf. The patriarchal Puritan family subordinated women: they were seen as minors, unable to make most contracts and required to give their property to their husband on marriage.

Birth took place at home with a midwife and female kin and neighbors, but physicians like Mason Fitch Cogswell, sponsor of the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, were increasingly challenging the practice, determined to make obstetrics a medical specialty.'1 If the infant survived pregnancy and delivery, its life was threatened by scarlet fever, measles, mumps, whooping cough, smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, typhus, respiratory and intestinal disorders, and quack medicine (bleeding, leeching, purging, induced vomiting). If a child did not succumb to one of these illnesses he or she might become Deaf, like Mason Cogswell's Deaf daughter, AliceD (on whom more later). One in every seven infants died before age one.12 One in three died before age twenty113 The likelihood that parents would bury a child was increased by the high birth rate. Death was common in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and not romanticized.

New England farmers put a high value on education for their children. A 1647 law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony required every town with more than fifty families to have a reading and writing school and those with more than one hundred, a high school. These schools were open only for the four winter months. Most pupils were between six and twelve; apprenticeship began at age fourteen.14 Girls were admitted to school in most communities but not all. Not until 1817 did the New England states sponsor education for Deaf children.

There were few markets at first to encourage the growing of surplus crops; but as rural agricultural towns evolved, they became trading centers for an entire agricultural area. The first towns and villages tended to aggregate around water power (used for sawmills and gristmills) and around transportation routes. Those towns became hubs for gathering the products of trapping, farming, and foresting, which they shipped out of the region, and for receiving manufactured goods, which they distributed in the region. A large portion of surplus produce was transported to seacoast towns, there to be sold in coastal and international trade. The Massachusetts seacoast had three hundred whaling vessels at the time of the Revolution, over one hundred of them harbored at the island of Martha's Vineyard, site of a large Deaf enclave, many of whom were fishermen. Whalers set forth on perilous voyages in search of spermaceti wax for candles and blubber for whale oil, the best means of domestic lighting then available. Seacoast towns also exploited forest wealth. Profiting from its immense forests, Maine developed a vast shipbuilding industry where Deaf laborers found work. Oaks yielded ship planking; pine trees provided masts and pitch for waterproofing; both kinds of wood went into the construction of barrels for shipping agricultural produce. Although trading with England was reduced just after the Revolution, in the following years England's demand for American products resumed, fueled by its war with France. In 1800, four out of five Americans were engaged primarily in agriculture; farmers consumed most imported products and provided most exported ones. Federal policy encouraged agriculture.

The export-import trade flourished. Merchants pushed their activities inland, thereby buttressing the growing agriculture. They brought in imported goods and brought out farmers' surplus productions. Furthermore, farmers sold some of their produce in local markets. In addition to the farmers and the merchant class, there was an artisan class closely related to both. A family in the artisan class passed on a symbolic property, such as a highly skilled occupation, to the members of the next generation who usually remained in the same area. This practice fostered stable extended families; it helped children with ambition to move up in the world; and it generated surplus wealth, for such apprentice labor was cheap. Among the artisan class were itinerant portrait painters, such as John BrewsterD Jr. and Augustus FullerD, both of whom attended the American Asylum. Other Deaf artisans were cabinetmakers, shoemakers, printers, mechanics, and dressmakers-to name just a few.

The Napoleonic wars at the dawn of the nineteenth century originally helped but then hurt American shipping. France bought from America products that originated in the British West Indies that she could no longer buy from her adversary. And England used the neutral American fleet to trade with hostile nations. However, thousands of American ships were seized by French or British warships or privateers. In response, President Thomas Jefferson, hoping to show the combatants how much they needed a neutral carrier, imposed a fourteen-month embargo on shipping to foreign ports, which stifled foreign trade. In the War of 1812 the British blockaded New England shipping, drying up the market for farm produce. When the war ended, factories sprung up at every waterfall but then cheap foreign goods poured in and the nascent prosperity was extinguished. By 1819 all the textile mills had closed. On the island of Martha's Vineyard, the sheep flock, reduced during the Revolution, had been built up again only to be depleted once more when commandeered by the army in the War of 1812.

Thanks to the coming of the railroad in the mid-nineteenth century, new mills sprung up in places like Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire, providing farmers with customers for food and fiber right near home. These water-powered machines freed farm women from spinning and weaving. Released from that labor, many farm girls, some of them Deaf, flocked to the mills. With mill rather than farm labor, girls could afford much better clothes as well as comforts and luxuries previously out of reach. The rails also drastically reduced rural isolation. Because rail transportation in New England was widespread, rapid and relatively inexpensive, it made possible the gathering of more Deaf people than ever before, allowing them to form a critical mass for socializing and political action. The gatherings that led to the first institutions of the American Deaf-World had their forerunners in the Deaf enclaves of southern New Hampshire and the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, which we examine next.

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The first great American Deaf leader was Thomas BrownD (1804-1886), who was born in Henniker, New Hampshire, thirteen years before the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb opened in Hartford, Connecticut, and who died in Henniker six years after the 1880 congress of Milan. Our story begins with his because he founded important institutions for the Deaf in America and because his family, with Deaf people in every generation, was central to the Deaf enclave in Henniker. (See a portrait of Thomas BrownD in Fig. 1.)

Figure 1 Thomas Brown portrait. Courtesy, Gallaudet University Archives.

To the best of our knowledge, the Brown - Swett - Sanders clan of Henniker was one of only two early American Deaf founding families in the northeast. By "founding," we understand three or more consecutive generations of Deaf people, starting before 1800.1

We use the term clan to refer to a group of Deaf lineages linked by Deaf marriage. We make the presumption, for which there is often evidence, that the Deaf members share a signed language and "feel knit to one another."2 We have made the case in Part I that common ancestry is not necessary for kinship; Deaf people are kin based on a shared physical trait, shared language and culture, and diffuse enduring solidarity. However, the members of many Deaf clans do share ancestry, as was the case with the BrownD clan. Thomas BrownD s grandfather, also named Thomas, lived in Stow, Massachusetts, with his wife, eight daughters, and a son, NahumD-the first Deaf-mute in the family, as far as anyone knew. (See Fig. 2, BrownD Pedigree.) In the figures, circles stand for females, squares for males, diamonds for multiple children, filled symbols for Deaf, and open symbols for hearing. See Appendix C, Pedigree Methods, for details.)3 The progenitor of this Brown family in America, Thomas Browne, left Suffolk County in England and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts4 His grandson, Jabez, moved to Stow where son Joseph was born. Joseph's son, Thomas Brown, was born and raised in Stow, where he took up the trade of blacksmith and, in 1763, married Persis Gibson. The Gibson line originated in the United States with John Gibson, who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony about 1634; his birthplace in England is not known.

In 1785 Thomas Brown fled Stow with his family to Henniker, New Hampshire, a virtual wilderness some hundred miles away. It seems that Thomas had contracted a hard-currency debt that he was unable to pay. At the time of the Revolution, the colonial states printed their own money, "fiat money," not backed by coin. Too much of this money was printed, and Thomas's money lost its value. According to his son, NahumD, he once took a bushel of fiat money and dumped it into a grain bin in the attic .5 Increasingly lenders wanted repayment in British gold, pounds, or other hard currency. Fearing debtors' prison, Thomas set out for Henniker where his wife's family, former residents of Stow, had moved. Henniker is located on the Contoocook River; the early settlers would have been drawn there by the numerous large ponds teeming with fish, the dense forests with abundant game, the large meadowlands and waterfalls that could be harnessed to power mills.

On arriving, Thomas made a clearing and built a log cabin, which stood for nearly a century and was known as the Brown House. Then, according to one account, he sent word to NahumD (it is not clear how, at a distance, he would have instructed his thirteen-year-old Deaf son to do this) to hitch two yoke of oxen to a sled, load the furniture and food, bundle his mother and sisters atop the load and, armed with a goad, prod the oxen a hundred miles through the snow to Henniker.6 According to another account, NahumD preceded his father to Henniker and was living with his uncle, Captain Timothy Gibson, Jr. (Gibson was a sergeant in the French and Indian War). In that case, it was probably NahumDs father, Thomas, who brought the family.?

The contemporaries of NahumDs father described him as smart, energetic, and fond of books; he held minor elected posts in later years. His eight daughters, tall, blue-eyed, good-looking, were said to be brilliant, witty, and well educated; most became teachers. Neighbors and relatives had a harder time judging son NahumDs intellect since he was Deaf; he was called plucky, a skillful axman and hunter, a model farmer, and a first-rate teamster of oxen and horses. Of course, no one thought of his becoming a teacher or even of his going to school.