To that end, Mr. Henry Belin Jr. was appointed head of a committee to visit an existing school in Philadelphia. There, Mr. Belin met and observed Emma Garrett. Their meeting would shape the development of the Scranton school.

Miss Garrett had graduated from the Boston University School of Oratory in 1878, where she had followed Alexander Graham Bell’s course for teachers. At the time that Mr. Belin and Miss Garrett met, two methods of teaching were in use. One relied on sign language. Miss Garrett both used and advocated the oral method, a method of speech and lip reading. Mr. Belin was so taken by the oral method that he read all he could find on the subject.

The school opened with 12 pupils on Sept. 10, 1883, in the chapel of the German Methodist Church. It used the oral method of teaching.

A committee looked after its needs and provided for its support. That committee included, among others, Mr. Belin, L.A. Watres, Samuel Logan, William Connell, John Jermyn, William T. Smith, and E.B. Sturges. The school was supported in part by private subscriptions.

Mary Allen, a former pupil of Miss Garrett’s, was hired as teacher. Miss Garrett herself was hired as principal for the 1884-85 school year. When Miss Allen resigned in 1885, Miss Garrett took on the duties of both principal and teacher.

By the following year, it became apparent that a mere day school was not enough. A boarding school was needed. In the fall of 1883, the search began for a building site. Five acres of land were secured from the Pennsylvania Coal Co.

Five more acres were acquired, and the land was made fit for a building and grounds.

By 1884, Mr. Watres began to look to the state for patronage. John T. Williams had been elected to the state Legislature in the fall of 1884. During his first term, he introduced an appropriations bill for the school. It passed both houses but was defeated by Gov. Robert E Pattison.

Williams tried again during his second term, this time under a new governor. His appropriations bill again passed both houses. Gov. James A. Beaver signed the bill.

Meanwhile, the school took on additional pupils and teachers. It looked to the Home for the Friendless to board children. In the fall of 1886, Bishop O’Hara provided, rent free, a house at 312 Wyoming Ave.

On June 3, 1888, Miss Garrett, with members of the legislature and the governor in attendance, removed the first shovel of earth in a ground-breaking ceremony for the new Oral School for the Deaf.

She remained principal of the school from 1884 until 1891. In February 1982, she and her sister Mary opened, in a Philadelphia suburb, the Pennsylvania Home for the Training in Speech of Deaf Children Before They Are of School Age.

The Rev. Koehler remained a leading advocate of compulsory education of the deaf. He served as president of the National Association of the Deaf from 1896 to 1900.

He was twice president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Advancement of the Deaf, and a U.S. representative to the World Congress of the Deaf in Paris in 1889.

As for the institution they started, it stands proudly today as the Scranton State School for the Deaf.

http://www.scrantontimes.com/articles/2009/03/29/news/sc_times_trib.20090329.d.pg1.tt29history_s1.2406951_loc.txt