Existing comment:
Gallaudet College; Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet
Gallaudet University is the only accredited liberal arts university in the world devoted to the education of students with hearing impairments. It was begun here on the Kendall Green estates back in 1856 when Amos Kendall set up a small school on his estate to tutor five orphaned children who were deaf and mute. Kendall had been President Andrew Jackson's Postmaster General and went on to make a killing as business manager for Samuel Morse (the telegraph). In 1857, the school was chartered as the Columbia School Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. In 1864, it was chartered as a four-year college. Kendall died in 1869 and the school was renamed in honor of the school's first teacher, Edward Miner Gallaudet in 1894.
In 1894, the school became a football first. The school's football team, the Bison, found that opposing teams could read their sign language used to call on-field plays. They found they could communicate in private by forming a tight circle around the quarterback. This was the origin of the football huddle.
In 1989, the school board selected a new president who could speak sign language but was not actually hearing impaired. The student body effectively shut down the school at this slight and the president was replaced by a hearing-impaired individual.
Shown here is a statue of one of the Gallaudets. Edward Gallaudet, for whom the school was named, also has two buildings named for him but his statue is located in a less public area. |