Students and fluent speakers of ASL are well acquainted with the origins of ASL–it’s as ubiquitous as George Washington and that damned apocryphal apple tree. But how often do we think of those early students who laid the foundations of Deaf culture?

For the uninitiated, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, reverend and resident of Hartford, Connecticut, met his neighbor’s young daughter Alice Cogswell while she played. She had lost her hearing at a tender age and her tutoring had been less than successful. Gallaudet sat with Alice and taught her to write the word “hat” in the dirt.

Alice was an intelligent young lady who only needed the opportunity to learn in her native language. After a lengthy fundraising campaign, a very long stay in Europe, and with the invaluable help of a brilliant deaf Frenchman (future blog post topic), Gallaudet opened the Connecticut Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (later the American School for the Deaf) in 1817.

In researching Cacophony, I read through hundreds of ASD student names and, even more humbling, their original compositions. Alice Cogswell may have been the first enrolled and the most famous of those early students, but each name rang true to me. I saw them enroll and graduate, I read the accounts of who paid for their schooling and their own words. They wrote on topics from the mundane to the fantastic, current events and history. As I read, I found myself highlighting half the page and calling my partner over to share their charming submissions.

The mystery of these students’ lives compelled me to write a novel about the average students at this extraordinary school at this exciting time in Deaf History—before the Oralists and their ilk took over, when a deaf person could exist as an individual worthy of respect, albeit far from equal.

I traveled to Hartford in September 2017 to continue my research. In practice, it was a pilgrimage to the people and places who inspire me most. In the Old North Cemetery of Hartford, Connecticut I stood before Alice’s impressive white marble headstone. Standing there on that hallowed ground, my awe was tempered by disappointment. Alice’s grave stands, a testament to a woman who died young after inspiring a revolution in education. But I had come to Old North Cemetery in search of a different young woman named Caroline Bedford, a girl of sixteen from New York who was the first student to pass away at ASD in 1824. After searching for hours, I concluded her grave had been lost to time (likely in the last century). Her classmates wrote of her funeral and the school mourned her loss. Reading their accounts, I could not help envisioning what it must have been like for Caroline and her classmates.

Caroline and the other students of ASD are just as important as Alice. They laid the groundwork for the Deaf Culture we know today, despite being almost (some entirely) lost to history. Their perseverance and spirit live on in the fabric of American Sign Language and Deaf History. Their experiences, while not the famous trans-Atlantic journey of Gallaudet and Clerc or the tender moment between Alice and Gallaudet, deserve the same degree of focus and importance. Yet Caroline’s burial place is now a blank field in the cemetery and every student of ASL knows the name Alice Cogswell.

I seek to honor every student at ASD through my writing. While Cacophony touches many facets, my inspiration will always be found in the lists of real people who lived at ASD and those who never left.

I’ve always been fascinated by old homes. More recently I’ve expanded this interest to how entire neighborhoods and cities evolve. Yesterday, I took a two hour walk through Salt Lake City, where I live.

I was walking on a sidewalk on an overpass when I saw an old home from the 1800s, now used as a construction company office. The bricks were Utah-brick orange and you could see the charm of the old farmhouse through the construction equipment on the front lawn. I wondered if they had neighbors where the freeway now was. I wondered who had lived there and what they would think of the city’s progress.

Continuing on, I entered some residential neighborhoods in South Salt Lake. A street with simple ramblers from the 1940’s – 1950’s had two contrasting houses I found fascinating. One house had decades-old green paint peeling off the wood siding. The house next door had a shiny SUV in the driveway and the sparkling polish of renovation just under the 50’s-style window awnings. Their bones were so similar, they were so close in proximity, yet so different. At the end of the road I saw newly-constructed three story townhouses.

I was almost at my destination. As I walked towards the older part of town, I went back in time again, this time to the first half of the 20th century. I cut through the parking lot of a Mission style school, now a library. It looked like it belonged in San Diego but here it is. Large Craftsman style mansions lined the road, some better cared for than others. As I walked, I tried my best to peel away the numerous 2nd story additions and layout changes to see what the house had been when it was built and what the street was like back then. It must have been a much quieter street than today. I passed another very old farmhouse by another freeway. Bed sheets covered the large bay window. It was beautiful.

I must have looked odd, leering at people’s houses. I didn’t care. There’s so many stories all around us and I think more people should take the time to read them in the walls and streets where they live. I’m not sure what my takeaway from this stroll through the neighborhoods of my city. At least I can say I have a new appreciation for the amount of diversity and change in relatively small geographic area.