The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (29 page)

Several Campbell family letters have been preserved-twenty-five that we know of. Most are from Elizabeth Adams, mother of the Deaf Campbells, addressed to her hearing daughter, Sophia, who had married a hearing man and lived for a time in East Haddam, Connecticut.'° Sophia's brother GeorgeD wrote her a letter in 1864 that is instructive about Deaf lives.

Dear Sis Sophie, [George wrote, February 14, 18641

Your welcome letter of two weeks ago came to hand duly and I was very glad to hear from you and of your good health and the same of your little family. We are usually well. AdeliaD [their sister] is slowly getting better. She can walk but slow and weak. This morning was the first time ever she went into the kitchen and breakfasted with us since she was taken sick.

Health is the most recurrent theme in the letters. Life then was "lived next to an open grave" for hearing and Deaf alike. A few months earlier, Sophia's mother had written to her to say that her sister AdeliaD was ill. AdeliaD recovered, but later became gravely ill in childbirth. George's sister ElizabethD ("Libby") lost use of her right hand. Later letters reveal Sophia not well and her mother, Elizabeth ("Betsy"), quite ill. GeorgeD himself had fainting spells and, four years after this letter to Sis Sophie, he became delirious, and died, only thirty-one years old,

[GeorgeD's letter to Sophia continues...]

... Charles ChandlerD [second cousin] is here now. You spoke of pictures. I will take them for you and tell me which of your pictures you want is copied! I take better photographs than last year. I do not have much trade here this winter. LibbyD is still here with us. She sends you and all [the family] her love and wants to see you very much.

The search for work is another recurrent theme-for the male Campbells. Two hearing brothers, William and Robert, had such difficulty they enlisted in the Civil War, where William died in battle. He had worked for a while in a lumber mill and his father had worked in a shipyard-these were the leading Maine industries in mid-nineteenth century. GeorgeD had found his trade as a photographer and printer. Several of the Campbell couples raised crops, and many of the women worked at carding and spinning wool and making garments.

GeorgeD's news that his cousin, Charles ChandlerD, is visiting announces the third theme of the letters, after health and workcontacts among the Deaf. GeorgeD s cousin, Dorcas Campbell, had married William Chandler. Their son, CharlesD, was visiting GeorgeD and GeorgeD's wife, Sarah Maria GibsonD. In this way a clan develops that grows wider with each marriage. All the Deaf Campbells who married, married a Deaf person. And all of the hearing Campbells married hearing.

One important reason for this endogamous marriage among the Deaf was shared language. When GeorgeD was dying, his sister ElizabethD tended to him for three months. His mother wrote to their sister Sophia: "You know, she [ElizabethD] could talk with him and they could get along with her better than with me. . . ." It appears that Sophia was fluent in sign language as well. When her sister AdeliaD was sick, her mother wrote to Sophia: "I wish you was here now; perhaps you could be of some help for to talk with Adelia and inform the doctor more plainer her complaints than she can...

George CampbellDs words at the end of his letter remind us of how close many separated Maine Deaf families were thanks to river transport. GeorgeD lived in Richmond, the nearest Kennebec landing to Bowdoin. "A few days ago [GeorgeD wrote] there were a 102 sleighs on the ice, called horse trot, from here to Bath in the afternoon." That would be a fast thirteen-mile trip up the frozen Kennebec River, the Maine superhighway of that era.

Reviewing George CampbellD s entire letter, we find his writing as proficient as that of his hearing mother which, if representative, reflects very well on Deaf education in that era.

The full set of twenty-five letters leaves the reader impressed by how often the Deaf Campbells faced the same issues as hearing families did-health, work, marriage and childbirth, and religion. Within the family, hearing and Deaf Campbells were viewed pretty much in the same way and with similar expectations. True, those Deaf who went to school (GeorgeD, AbnerD, and AdeliaD) went to a school for the Deaf in Hartford. And mother Campbell did express regret that she was not as fluent in sign as her Deaf daughters. But there was little or no talk of Deaf affliction. What set Deaf people apart were their language and their practice of bonding with other Deaf people.

THE CURTIS-ROWE CLAN

Nancy RoweD hailed from a large Deaf family whose ancestors came from Devonshire in England (see Fig. 17, Curtis-Rowe pedigree). On immigrating to America in mid-seventeenth century, they settled first in Gloucester, Massachusetts. After a time, citing the poverty of husbandry on the "meager lands" of Cape Ann, they applied to the General Court of His Majesty the King of Britain for a grant of a township in the virgin Maine interior (then a district of Massachusetts). The petition was granted in 1736, the new town, named New Gloucester, to be laid out in sixty-three equal shares, one for the minister, one for the meetinghouse, one for the school, the rest for the settlers, among them Nancy's ancestors.1' The petitioners were required to settle all the lots, to build their homes and a meeting house, and to cultivate six acres of land each. New Gloucester was located eighteen miles from the Campbells in Bowdoin and twenty miles north of Portland on the Royal River, a natural route to the interior. By 1742, the nineteen original settlers had built their cabins and erected a sawmill, so they sent for their families in Gloucester, who traveled to North Yarmouth by boat and from there poled on rafts with all their possessions and supplies up the Royal River. The town also received settlers from Martha's Vineyard.12

With the beginning of the French and Indian War, hostile Indians threatened the settlers and it was difficult to secure more pioneers despite bounties that were offered. Soon the men were driven from their fields to defend their homes, the cabins and sawmill were burned, and the bridges carried away by freshets. The settlers fled to Gloucester or to seacoast settlements in Maine. The town was abandoned for some seven years whereupon it had a second life. Worship was conducted in the blockhouse for protection but eventually a meetinghouse was built. The areas of reserved seating are noteworthy: one area for "colored brethren," one for wardens with long poles to wake sleepers, and one area up front for those "whose hearing was impaired."13 There were indeed about a dozen Deaf Rowes and spouses in the town.

Nancy RoweD had five Deaf brothers and two Deaf sisters. She also had five hearing siblings, of whom three died in infancy. Nancy s parents were carriers of the Deaf trait unexpressed; they were distantly related: her paternal grandparents were both Rowes, and one of her mother's ancestors married one of her father's forebears. Thus we infer that NancyD and her seven Deaf siblings were overtly Deaf because of a recessive pattern of transmission. That both of Nancy's parents were hearing is consistent with that hypothesis but the fact that more than half of their children were overtly Deaf is not. On average, only onefourth of the children should express a recessive trait as we have explained. It is unlikely that chance alone explains the occurrence of eight Deaf children in a family of thirteen when only a fourth of thirteen (3.25) is expected.'4

NancyD entered the American Asylum in 1829, age thirteen; six Deaf Rowes were to be educated there. Four years later, NancyD graduated and Principal Lewis Weld gave her a certificate testifying that she had been "a pupil of the American Asylum, [and] made good attainments in the knowledge of written language and other branches of a common education."15

When she was twenty-four, Nancy RoweD married George CurtisD, from Leeds, Maine, and moved there to live with him. Leeds, of which we spoke earlier in connection with the Jennings family, is nine miles from Winthrop and twenty-five miles from New Sharon on the Sandy River.16 Four children, all hearing, would be born to the couple over the next fifteen years. If GeorgeD and NancyD were overtly Deaf because they both had two copies of the same recessive gene, then all of their children would have been overtly Deaf. That they were not suggests that GeorgeD and NancyD had different recessive genes. This seems more likely as GeorgeD's ancestors came from Kent, whereas NancyD s came from Devonshire.

Like Nancy RoweD, George CurtisD had hearing parents and several Deaf siblings. He had a Deaf brother and two Deaf sisters.17 He also had three brothers and three sisters who were hearing; one of those was Sophia Curtis, who married Thomas BrownD of Henniker after the death of his first wife. Perhaps ThomasD met Sophia through her brother GeorgeD who overlapped with him at the American Asylum. The Brown-Curtis wedding notice in the National Deaf-Mute Gazette (successor to the Guide), reveals both BrownD s stature and the need to explain his mixed marriage: "Mr. Brown is too well known to need any notice at our hands. His wife is a hearing lady whose relationship to and constant intercourse with mutes enables her to use their language."18 ThomasD and Sophia were married in Yarmouth, Maine, in November of 1864, and then took up residence in Henniker.

George CurtisDs paternal ancestors came from Kent, as noted, and his parents were hearing, which is consistent with recessive transmission. The fact that the Curtis family counted four overtly Deaf children out of ten is only somewhat greater than would be expected and is likely due to chance. GeorgeDs father, William, brought his family to Leeds, Maine, from Hanover, Massachusetts, in 1824.19 William's parents were related. All three of GeorgeD's Deaf siblings overlapped Nancy RoweD at the American Asylum; any of them could have introduced the couple, who were married in 1840. GeorgeDs sister AnnD, a factory worker, married a Deaf Rowe, as did his brother EbenezerD, a joiner, so there were many Deaf ties between New Gloucester and Leeds. The towns were twenty-four miles apart, a daunting distance on foot in the Maine wilderness, but both towns are located near the Androscoggin River. River transport facilitated travel, especially in winter when sleighing was good-recall GeorgeD Campbell's attendance at "horse trot."20 Numerous Deaf families lived rather close to Leeds, which is in the Androscoggin settlement cluster. For example, in Turner alone, six miles distant, we find the Briggs-Record clan with seven Deaf members including spouses, the Riggs clan with eleven Deaf, and the Allen family, described earlier (see Fig. 9, Allen pedigree), with eight Deaf. Seventeen miles away in Bowdoin were the Campbell clan with eleven Deaf members in all, and within a twenty-mile radius several more Deaf families came within a day's reach of Leeds.

In Leeds, GeorgeD and NancyD farmed and raised children, but some of their Deaf siblings worked in various trades such as shoemaking and tailoring, while others went to work in the new cotton mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In leaving the land for factories, Deaf people were subject to the same economic forces as hearing people. With population growth (Maine's population increased more than 50 percent from 1790 to 1800) there was more competition for land, so land prices increased. With each succeeding generation, there was less land to go around. The land-poor had trouble acquiring more in New England, but the landrich became richer as land values rose.21 An entrepreneurial class developed as merchants pushed inland, bringing in imported goods and bringing out farmers' surplus production, as we related earlier. With the rise of factories in the nineteenth century, many women left domestic production and went to work in these facilities. Too poor to purchase the increasingly expensive land, some of the Rowes and Curtises were obliged to apprentice in a trade or work in a factory. The 1850 census found in Lawrence, Massachusetts, LucyD, MosesD, PersisD, and SamuelD and his wife SophiaD.

An 1846 letter from Nancy RoweD's Aunt Judith in New Gloucester to NancyD and GeorgeD in Leeds provides some insight into Maine Deaf family life in that era. (Aunt Judith was NancyD's father's sister.) We find in the letter that some Deaf people farmed but others entered the trades, often far from home. And health was a constant concern.

Dear GeorgeD and NancyD ... I thought BenjaminD [NancyDs brother] would come home in May, [and] he and MosesD and PersisD [two of NancyDs siblings] would visit you.... We received a letter from SamuelD [one of NancyDs five Deaf brothers]. He stated in his letter he thought B[enjamin] would hire in a Mr. Marsh's shop [a shoemaker] to work for him. [Benjamin] has not come and we think it is truly so-which is without doubt for the best-cabinet makers get small wages in N.G. New Gloucester]. We can't any of us visit you at present. It is hurrying time for farmers. Your mother and father wish me to write it would not be profitable for NathanielD or MosesD [NancyDs brothers] to go to you nor profitable for you to have them come. Best take advice of your brother Joseph [one of George CurtisD s brothers] and your parents at Leeds what is best for you and your dear little children. PersisD [NancyDs sister] is hired to live with Mrs. Moseley this spring.... I was at Mary Taylor's when she was sick.... She died with a fever on her lungs.... Mrs. Reyns was taken sick the day Mary was buried.... I was at your uncle Charles Haskells last week, all well. Your uncle Reyns' family are now well. Your father is going to Dr. Stevens to work today.... We all send our love and good wishes to you and your friends at Leeds. Aunt Judith Rowe 22

Health and the trades also figure in this excerpted letter from Samuel RoweD, NancyD s brother, to Ebenezer CurtisD, George CurtisD s Deaf brother. We also get a glimpse of the Deaf-World at that time. SamuelD was the most accomplished of the Deaf Rowes. Active in the New England Gallaudet Association of Deaf-Mutes and general manager of the Deaf-Mute Mission, he was to be ordained in 1878 as an evangelist in the Congregational church.23 At that time it was estimated that there were five hundred "deaf-mutes" in Maine. The brother-in-law to whom SamuelD wrote in 1849, EbenezerD, was an alumnus of the American Asylum, a joiner by trade, also a member of the NEGA and secretary of the Maine Deaf-Mute Mission.

Dear friend EbenezerD... This is to inform you that I am pleasantly situated in this town [Keene, N.H.] and am employed by Messrs. Hagar and Whitcomb [a tailoring firm].... I left P. [Portsmouth?] for Boston and I took my opp[ortunity] in Boston at 9 o'clock and saw some former deaf-mutes, viz Homer SmithD, and some old ones I did not remember well. I held good conversation with HomerD most of the time and I could find that he was a stable minded fellow and I was so attached to him that I was sorry for not conversing with him long enough for I was obliged to leave B[oston]. I was terribly afraid of walking about the streets-the reason was that the madness of the inferior people made me so and was seriously informed of a poor man who was at the bar to be examined before the judge and his crime was "murder"! And he was sentenced to be hanged next month and there was a full [?] crowd of people in the court where the murderer was at that time. I was in the Register of Deeds building and I was cordially entertained by Amos SmithD [a graduate of the American Asylum and NEGA member]. He was rather grown fast and earns well. No important news but I cannot tell you about the peoples going to California to get "Dust" [i.e., the gold rush]. I had made some attempts to find some employment [apparently in Boston] but No! I bore disappointments well. Spent four days in B[oston]. I started for this town [Keene, N.H.] from Boston on Monday afternoon and arrived at 7 o'clock in the night and the fare was $5 from my native place! Very cheap fare indeed beyond my expectation. My sister and brother were convinced.... I ran away or something ... but I explained to them about being obliged to come to the "Granite State.". . . My sister PersisD is employed by Messers Hagar and Whitcomb and I also but [brother] BenD is employed by Mr. Vandoorn [a cabinetmaker] in Brattleboro. You will laugh at me for I am every day happy to be in company with sister PersisD, Lucy M. ReedD [wife of Benjamin RoweD] who works with PersisD, and LucyD's brother AdinD is in this town and works as a printer. I enjoy talking with them very well.... I fell in with Mr. Nelson KelleyD an American Asylum graduate from West Rutland, Vt.] and recollect of his unfaithful offer to AnnD [EbenezerD s sister]. Do you remember what I told you, that Mr. K[elley] is seeking a lady? Yes, he is going to see sister LucyD [SamuelDs sister] but in my opinion he is unworthy to be married to LucyD, as I remember he once deceived your sister AnnD....