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Adelia M. Hoyt memoir and photographs
Page 14
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14 UNFOLDING YEARS sew and knit. I helped with the housework, not so much because my family wished it, but more to satisfy my own inner urge to do things. From and early age I seemed to resent not being allowed to do what another child of my age would be expected to do. Sometimes I think I really outdid other children in really hard work. I washed and dried dishes, set table, made beds, dusted, washed windows and cleaned lamp chimneys. I never was so happy as when praised for some work which I knew I had done well. And so the time passed. I do not know just when my parents decided to send me to the Iowa School for the Blind. It must have cost them a bitter struggle for it meant that they had accepted the fact that I was blind. To send me away from home must have seemed a little short of cruel; but to them and education meant everything and they wisely thought of my future. A school for the blind was not entirely a new idea to my father. His youngest sister, Maria, for whom I was named, lived in Janesville, Wisconsin, at the time when Doctor Howe sent a blind man out from Boston to organize the Wisconsin School for the Blind. My aunt, then a girl of seventeen, became his assistant. This young man, whose name has escaped me, was a brilliant scholar, but intemperate and frequently incapacitated. This threw the management of the school on my Aunt Maria's young shoulders. It was she who alone took a group of students to the Wisconsin legislature and secured their first appropriation. Later this blind man was dismissed and was superseded by a sighted man, one Alec McDonald. He too was sent out by Doctor Howe. This young man was probably less gifted and far less interested in the blind, yet was able with the help of my aunt to establish the Wisconsin School on a firm foundation. He also won the heart of Aunt Maria. Soon after their marriage they left the school and returned to Boston. They were intimate with the Howe family and when their first child, a little girl, arrived she was named Julia for Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. Two other children were born to them, both boys. Then came the Civil War and young Alec McDonald, now an M. D., enlisted. Malaria and long
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14 UNFOLDING YEARS sew and knit. I helped with the housework, not so much because my family wished it, but more to satisfy my own inner urge to do things. From and early age I seemed to resent not being allowed to do what another child of my age would be expected to do. Sometimes I think I really outdid other children in really hard work. I washed and dried dishes, set table, made beds, dusted, washed windows and cleaned lamp chimneys. I never was so happy as when praised for some work which I knew I had done well. And so the time passed. I do not know just when my parents decided to send me to the Iowa School for the Blind. It must have cost them a bitter struggle for it meant that they had accepted the fact that I was blind. To send me away from home must have seemed a little short of cruel; but to them and education meant everything and they wisely thought of my future. A school for the blind was not entirely a new idea to my father. His youngest sister, Maria, for whom I was named, lived in Janesville, Wisconsin, at the time when Doctor Howe sent a blind man out from Boston to organize the Wisconsin School for the Blind. My aunt, then a girl of seventeen, became his assistant. This young man, whose name has escaped me, was a brilliant scholar, but intemperate and frequently incapacitated. This threw the management of the school on my Aunt Maria's young shoulders. It was she who alone took a group of students to the Wisconsin legislature and secured their first appropriation. Later this blind man was dismissed and was superseded by a sighted man, one Alec McDonald. He too was sent out by Doctor Howe. This young man was probably less gifted and far less interested in the blind, yet was able with the help of my aunt to establish the Wisconsin School on a firm foundation. He also won the heart of Aunt Maria. Soon after their marriage they left the school and returned to Boston. They were intimate with the Howe family and when their first child, a little girl, arrived she was named Julia for Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. Two other children were born to them, both boys. Then came the Civil War and young Alec McDonald, now an M. D., enlisted. Malaria and long
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