(Not) Hearing History at Governor Baxter School for the Deaf

Governor Percival Baxter

Quakers enjoy a very long history in Maine, reaching back to the days when our state was still part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Thanks to my family's new relationship with Friends Camp in China, Maine, my life's path has crossed with that of Quaker history. For that reason, I found myself on Mackworth Island in Falmouth yesterday, attending a Friends Camp Committee meeting. The Quaker school presence on Mackworth is recent, made possible, I was told, by the shrinking enrollment at the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf. In the 1950s, Baxter deeded his summer island home to the state of Maine and eventually hosted the school that now bears his name.

1922 Portland Press Herald Glass Negative, Maine Memory

By coincidence, yesterday was the day of the Deaf Culture Festival, the 135th anniversary of deaf education in Maine, and the grand reopening of the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf Museum. I confess I didn't know this museum existed; it opened in 1995 to exhibit an array of school memorabilia, as well as teletype technology.

Baxter School for Deaf Museum Exhibit

During a break from my Committee meeting I dashed into the museum. Having no personal experience with the deaf community, I was fascinated by Bill Nye's collection of deaf communication devices. Their diverse forms paralleled the innovations in television, radio, phone, and telegram technologies.

Teletype Machine - exhibit at deaf culture museum

Sadly, the museum tentatively represented a more sober aspect of deaf student experience, one that I had not heard of previously. Apparently, like many other residential educational institutions (including those for Wabanaki peoples), the school for the deaf has a history of staff sexually abusing the children. While some apologies and public healing have taken place, many lives have been scarred, even lost.

I returned to the Quaker meeting, finding members in the process of discussing the quest for peace and acceptance in a broken world. Broken world. That was well said. If there's anything that history teaches us, it's that this struggle across centuries has been constant. It remains a quest worth pursuing.