Sarah Fuller (3) (1836–1927)

Sarah Fuller was born to a farming family in Weston, Massachusetts and graduated from the Allan English and Classical School in West Newton. She taught at schools in Newton and Boston. In 1869, she studied at the Clarke School for the Deaf under Harriet Burbank Rogers, a pioneer in the oral method of instruction of the deaf. Miss Fuller was preparing for her role as principal at the newly-formed Boston School for Deaf-Mutes -- now known as the Horace Mann School for the Deaf -- the first successful public day-school for deaf children in the country. In 1871, she invited Alexander Graham Bell to visit the school in order to train the staff how to teach deaf children to speak. She later applied his methods to give speech lessons to the young Helen Keller, leading to the book How Helen Keller was Taught Speech (1905).

In 1888, Miss Fuller published An Illustrated Primer for Teachers of the
Deaf. With Bell and others, she helped establish the progressive American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in 1890, and served as director of the association in 1896. In 1902, she founded the Home for Little Children Who Cannot Hear to promote instruction of deaf children of nursery-school age, and retired as its principal in 1910.