Keller had been rendered deaf, blind and mute by a severe fever at the age of 19 months. When her mother read about Perkins in Dickens' Notes on America , she contacted the school. Howe's son-in-law had taken over following Howe's death in He sent a recent Perkins graduate, the formerly blind Annie Sullivan, to work with Helen at her home in Alabama. After Annie's famous breakthrough in teaching Helen fingerspelling, the pair moved to Perkins and lived there for the next six years. The Perkins School has a long tradition of embracing innovation.
Seven years later it opened the first kindergarten for blind students in the U. In , with demand for its programs growing, Perkins moved to a acre campus on the banks of the Charles River in Watertown. There, in , the school introduced the first Perkins Brailler, which allowed student to type in Braille text; over the next 30 years, over , Brailler machines were produced and distributed across the country.
As the number of blind students educated in public schools has grown, the number of students in residence at Perkins has declined. Always evolving, Perkins expanded its mission to serve sighted children with other disabilities, including deafness, mental retardation, and cerebral palsy. In the s, Perkins began to offer services for visually impaired elders — the fastest-growing blind population.
In , to commemorate its th anniversary, the school opened the Perkins Museum, "a multi-sensory journey through the history of blind and deafblind education over the last years.
In , a new tactile museum opened on the school's Watertown campus. Perkins Publications, Howe lived most of her long life in Boston, but it was in March 2, Share this story.
Comments After several weeks of this, Laura experienced what Howe called the "supreme moment. It is a world capital of non-profit organizations, called non-governmental-organizations, or NGOs, in other countries. Foreign leaders visit Boston in great numbers to see how Boston has used its NGOs to transform distressed neighborhoods, create new ways to educate, provide services, and build new communities.
Boston is filled with non-profits, and I marvel at the way in which the non-profits have filled so many voids in Boston. From creating or renovating thousands of units of housing to creating health care and social services for hundreds of thousands of people, the non-profits have literally and figuratively saved low and moderate income communities across Boston and across the nation.
But beyond the social impact of these organizations, the actions of these non-profits has created an entire economy. That economy is indeed robust. At the time I had no idea just how prescient I was, for I had stumbled upon the truth. It was Puritan New England, far more than any other area of America, which preached the importance of doing good as its dogma.
And this command found its way into the lives and minds of colonial Bostonians, where people like Benjamin Franklin grew up understanding that making things better was part of life's expectations. If, in a local community, a citizen becomes aware of a human need that is not being met, he thereupon discusses the situation with his neighbors. Suddenly, a committee comes into existence. The committee thereupon begins to operate on behalf of the need and a new community function is established.
It is like watching a miracle, because these citizens perform this act without a single reference to any bureaucracy or any official agency. During the "Celebrate Boston!
Boston should also celebrate social innovation as a Boston invention, one that has spread throughout our country and the world, creating mechanisms for people in communities to fix their own problems and envision a better life for themselves and their communities. And it all started here in Boston. For one, individuals, usually wealthy, took the place of these organizations. If they didn't give of their funds to support schools, churchs, bonds for war, and poorhouses, the Court, citing greedy tendencies, would fine the individual and take the money through legal channels.
Also, the Puritan was motivated with a more sublime motive than performing a do-good deed when serving the public: He was loving God and obeying the commandment to extend charity to individuals. People who work in the non-profit sector, in my view, are motivated by the same desire to do good and help their fellow persons as the Puritans indeed, that's my point - the doing good continues.
Maybe the source of the funding is different individual, foundation and tax dollars vs. My disagreement is that I believe that a person doing good for secular reasons does not make the acts less sublime than a person doing good acts for religious reasons.
A transcribed copy of his application letter is below Concord, March 9th, ??? As I expect to be released from my engagement here in a fortnight, I should be glad to hear further if the above vacancy is not already filled. I refer you to Samuel??? Emerson or Dr. Josiah Bartlett of this town or to Pres. Quincy of Harvard University. Yours respectfully, Henry D.
Born in Boston, Thomas grew up during the American Revolution. When he was twelve he was in the crowd which first heard the Declaration of Independence read to the citizens of Boston. His parents, James Perkins and Elizabeth Peck, had ten children in eighteen years. James ran a store that sold such household items as cheese, tea, sugar, and wine.
When he died at forty in , his wife took over the the store. Under her management it prospered as never before. The family originally planned to send Thomas to Harvard, but he had no interest in a college education. In he worked for a year in a retail store run by William Dall and then moved to the larger mercantile firm of W. When he turned 21 he became legally entitled to a small bequest that had been left to him by his grandfather Peck.
His brother James was already engaged in business at Cape Francis as a commission agent for several North American merchants. They traded profitably in slaves, flour, horses, and dried fish. This was the first of a long series of business partnerships in which the two Perkins brothers were always the ones who ran the business. The Perkins credo, as Thomas wrote James, was: "Now is the heyday of life, let us improve it, and when the inclination and ability for exertion is over, let us have it in our power to retire from the bustle of the world and enjoy the fruits of our labour.
Sally's father ran a tobacconist shop near the Perkins house. While Thomas spent most of the first year of their marriage at Cape Francis, Sally lived in their new Boston home. They were married over sixty years and had eleven children. After the birth of their first child, Thomas returned to Boston and formed a partnership with James Magee, an uncle by marriage. Thomas's place in the West Indies was taken over by his brother Samuel.
In China opened the port of Canton to foreign businesses. Perkins was one of the first Boston merchants to engage in this risky yet profitable trade. In he sailed on the Astrea to Canton. Its cargo included ginseng, cheese, lard, wine, and iron.
On the trip back it carried tea and cotton cloth. As the trade developed, his ships went first to the coast of the Pacific Northwest to trade for furs from the native American Indians, and then to China to exchange the skins for Chinese goods. The China trade made Perkins a millionaire.
The Perkins's Saint-Domingue business collapsed as a result of the revolution which began there in They recouped, however, when in Thomas traveled to London and Paris and arranged to use his neutral vessels to carry on the trade between France and the West Indies.
A friend later wrote him from London that many merchants and bankers there considered him "rather a clever fellow. He joined the Federalists, the party of Washington and Hamilton and the one that reflected his conservative views.
On several occasions he was elected to the Massachusetts House and Senate. He was also one of the original members of the reorganized Independent Corps of Cadets, the local militia, rising in rank by to lieutenant colonel. He was afterwards called Colonel Perkins.
The Perkins brothers were busy merchants during the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the new one. They had three basic business strategies: short speculations in the West Indies, longer ones in Europe, and major investments in the growing China market. They acquired a fleet of their own ships. In they opened a branch office of the firm in Canton, giving them better access to and allowing more profitable business relations with the local Chinese merchants.
Although President Thomas Jefferson's Embargo of lasted fifteen months, it did little harm to J. It enabled them to get rid of their local stock and to buy at their Canton office new goods at prices lower than usual. Then the War of for a time nearly brought their trading business to a standstill. Fortunately, when the war ended they had a well-laden ship on its way home from Canton. An important key to the Perkins success had always been their ability to make the right decisions at the right time.
He was, for example, the driving force behind the Monkton Iron Company in Vermont. At the same time he participated in Andrew Craigie's land and bridge speculations in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the brothers, still retaining their keen spirit of business adventure, opened a Mediterranean office to buy Turkish opium for resale in China. Neither were concerned with the morality of selling slaves or opium. All that mattered to them was that what they traded should make money for the firm. Thomas's minister, William Ellery Channing, did not appreciate merchants much, even those in his congregation, and later condemned the business of slavery.
That end is to strengthen, to extend and keep in invigorating action, the principles of love to God and to our fellow creatures. In one sense that was the end of the firm. But Colonel Thomas Perkins never fully retired. Even after much of the business was turned over to younger members of his family, among them his great-nephew John Murray Forbes, he continued to dream up new ways to make money.
In Perkins was instrumental in encouraging the purchase of a granite quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts and then, to move the granite, in developing one of the first horse-drawn railways in America, the Granite Railway. The granite was needed for the Bunker Hill monument.
After he had discovered the beauty and allure of Nahant, he constructed and oversaw the first hotel there for wealthy summer visitors. Later he invested in building the famous Tremont House, the most modern hotel yet seen in Boston. His resources and his business experience fostered the pioneering cotton mills in Newton and Lowell, Massachusetts.
Perkins always loved the outdoors and nature and enjoyed gardening, hunting, fishing, and traveling. During his lifetime he made ten trips to England and the continent, as much for pleasure as for business. The Archives also contain personal letters and journals from famous alumni, including Laura Bridgman, the first person with deafblindness to be successfully educated, Helen Keller, and her teacher Anne Sullivan. Founded in as the nation's first chartered school for the blind, Perkins is a world-renowned center of excellence in the education of people who are blind, deafblind, or visually impaired, including those with multiple disabilities.
The idea for the school was first conceived by Dr. John Dix Fisher, an influential reformer of 19th-century Boston and physician who made great contributions to the understanding of contagious diseases, and helped found notable institutions in Boston, including the Massachusetts General Hospital. Since its incorporation, Perkins has had a number of different names and locations in the greater Boston area. In , the school moved to a house on Pearl Street that had been donated by Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a wealthy merchant and philanthropist.
Perkins later allowed the property to be sold in order to purchase a former hotel in South Boston where the school moved in May, In recognition of his generosity, the Board of Trustees named the school the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind. For many years, the Perkins Institution only admitted students who were older than 9 and younger than In , the second director of Perkins, Michael Anagnos, founded the first kindergarten for the blind, located in Jamaica Plain, due to overcrowding in South Boston.
The school moved to its current location in Watertown in , where it is located on a Visit institution web site. Digital Collections: Browse by:. Date View distribution. Date range begin Date range end.
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