Sarah Fuller was the principal of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston for 41 years, teaching countless deaf students how to speak, among them, Helen Keller.

When she died at 92 in 1927 in her home in Newton Lower Falls, obituaries remembered the immense influence she had had among deaf people in Massachusetts.

She was born in Weston in 1836, close to the Newton town line, but moved to Newton in 1850, and attended Nathaniel Allen’s school in West Newton. She started teaching in 1859 in Boston. In September 1869 she became principal of the very first free public day school for the deaf in the United States, which was opened in Boston on November 10, 1869.

She went to the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, to learn the new oral articulation method of teaching deaf children before taking up her role as principal. It was initially called the Boston School for Deaf Mutes until 1873, when it was renamed in honor of educational reformer Horace Mann, who had written reports on the oral schools in Germany.

(Mann was also a Newtonian: he lived in West Newton).

Today, this method of teaching, wherein deaf children are taught to read lips and speak vocally, is criticized by many deaf people. Deaf children were not allowed to use sign language at all, cutting them off from their more natural form of communication. But in the 19th century, it was considered progressive. “Deaf mutes who are confined to the sign language are apt to become clannish, separate themselves from the world, and dwell upon their misfortune,” said Fuller.

This was a difficult time to be a person with a disability, and people like Fuller wanted their students to be able to live in the world. The Horace Mann School was quick to emphasize that deaf children were just as intelligent as hearing children. The hope was that through the oral articulation method, deaf children could go on to live regular independent lives.

To assist with this, she started numerous vocational classes at the school, including a cooking class. Many boys eagerly signed up, undoubtedly because the cooking classes included candy making. Her alumni were grateful for their time at the school. In 1888, a 23-year-old from New Hampshire had written a thank you note, saying he had been unable to read or write when he first attended the school, and now he was employed on his own farm.

When she retired in 1910, Fuller received much praise from students, teachers, and alumni.

Fuller’s most famous pupil was Helen Keller. Keller knew other people’s mouths moved, and wanted to learn how to speak, but could not. Her teacher, Annie Sullivan, knew that Fuller would be able to help.

“I tried to make sounds like my little playmates, but teacher told me that the voice was very delicate and sensitive, and that it would injure it to make incorrect sounds, and promised to take me to see a kind and wise lady who would teach me rightly. That lady was yourself,” Keller wrote in an 1890 letter to Fuller.

“She was an ideal pupil, for she followed every direction with the utmost care, and seemed never to forget anything told to her,” Fuller said to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in 1891.

At the time, there were many deaf children who, like Keller, had become deaf due to illness. These students, who had residual memory of speech, were separated from children who were born deaf, who needed slower instruction to understand the concept. It was hard, but it was rewarding.

“It is a work that requires so much patience and repetition, and the progress made is of necessity very slow: but in time we are repaid by seeing and knowing the good results which we have obtained,” Fuller said.

She was very dedicated to her work.

The Boston Globe wrote in 1899: “Perhaps no woman in the world, certainly no woman in America, has done so much for those who are debarred by nature or disease from the privileges of the sense of hearing and the powers of articulation as Miss Fuller, and her word is authority in matters pertaining to the early training of such person.”

While Fuller did her own work in Boston, her Newton home was the site of someone else’s: Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was also a deaf educator. In one experiment, he used balloons Fuller provided to place under deaf children’s clothing to aid them in detecting the vibrations of approaching people and vehicles. These experiments would lead to Bell’s invention of the telephone, which he hoped would help aid deaf people in communication.

Fuller liked to tell people the telephone had been invented in her house.

In 1888, parents of a deaf child helped Fuller found the Sarah Fuller Home for Little Children Who Cannot Hear in West Medford. It was a boarding school for children who were too young for the Horace Mann School, because Fuller thought that earlier training in speech would be beneficial for deaf children.

When the home closed, its endowment was used to create the Sarah Fuller Foundation. In 2016, it funded the first endowed Sarah Fuller Chair for Hearing Loss and Restoration. This honor was given to Dr. Margaret Kenna, a pediatric otolaryngologist at Harvard Medical School who co-founded the Children’s Hospital Boston Cochlear Implant Program.