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On April
10, 1823, the Kentucky Asylum for the Tuition of the Deaf & Dumb,
with subsequent name change to the Kentucky School for the Deaf,
became the first state supported school of its kind in the nation
and in the western hemisphere. The three schools established in the
United States prior to the Kentucky School for the Deaf were
private. The Kentucky School was also the first school established
west of the Alleghenies.
General Elias Barbee, whose daughter, Lucy, was deaf, introduced the
bill to create the school in the Kentucky Assembly. The act
located the school at Danville, then a little town of four hundred
people, placed the management in the hands of the Board of Trustees of
Centre College.
The
Trustees met in early January, 1823, to prepare to put the school in
operation. They picked a two story frame building on the
south-west corner of Main and Forth streets. This building stood
until April 15, 1876, when it was destroyed along with the other
buildings in the big fire of that night.
Rev.
John Rice Kerr and his wife were selected by the Trustees as
Superintendent and Matron of the boarding department. They
received no salary, but they got some earnings from the rent paid by pay
students, while the state supported the indigent students.
The
Trustees chose John Adamson Jacobs, 17, a student of Centre College, to
take lessons in sign language from Mr. Clerc. He rode a horse to
Hartford, Connecticut. Mr. Gallaudet and Mr. Clerc trained
John in the methods of teaching and John ate and socialized with the
deaf students. Mr. Jacobs returned in 1825 and became principal of
KSD.
In a
few years, the "pay pupil" class had been wiped out. Backed by
Henry Clay, the federal government made a gift to the school of a
township of public land of Florida. The money from the sales of
Florida land was used from time to time through a period of one hundred
years in the construction of new buildings, for the purchase of
additional land, and in making needed improvements.
Rev.
Kerr and wife continued to manage the boarding department until their
death in 1833 from Asiatic cholera which was epidemic in Kentucky in the
summer of that year.
Fourteen superintendents later, history was made when Dr. Harvey Jay
Corson became the first deaf superintendent of KSD in October 1, 1994.
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