mployment
of his services.[170] In 1816 he went to New York, where he proposed to
start a school, and collected a few pupils, only to return to Virginia
again after a few months. In 1817 he began operations anew, this time at
a private classical school at Manchester under John Kilpatrick, a
minister. In less than a year this too was abandoned by Braidwood, who
soon after met his death. Kilpatrick attempted to continue the school
only a year or two longer, possibly even taking a few pupils with him
when he moved to Cumberland County in 1819; and so was brought to an end
the checkered career of this early school for the deaf in Virginia.[171]

Such were the beginnings of the instruction of the deaf in America.
With the exception of these undertakings, barely touching the surface in
the number of children reached, the only means of education possible in
the land was in sending children to a school in Europe, which was done
in the case of a few wealthy parents. For the great mass of the deaf,
isolated and scattered though they were at the time, there was no
instruction to be had.

But this period was now nearly passed. Attention in more than one
quarter was being directed to the deaf and the possibilities of their
education; and in the breasts of not a few men a feeling was astir that
instruction was somehow to be brought to them.[172] The seed was already
sown, and by the time the school in Virginia was broken up, others were
beginning to arise elsewhere. When the work was finally to be taken up,
it was to be upon a solid foundation which should last with the
lastingness of education.

BEGINNING OF THE FIRST SCHOOLS

The seat of the first permanent school to be established in the United
States for the education of the deaf was Hartford, Connecticut; and the
name of the one man with which the beginning work will forever be
coupled is that of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. America, however, was not
to commence the work of itself: the spirit and the method had to be
brought from Europe.

Early in the nineteenth century there lived at Hartford a young deaf
girl, Alice Cogswell by name, the daughter of a physician, and in her a
group of men had become interested. An investigation of the number of
the deaf had been made in 1812 by a body of clergymen, when 84 were
found, and it was estimated that there were 400 in New England, and
2,000 in the United States; and the question of a school had been
considered.[173] In 1815 the f