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History of Blindness in Iowa--Lois Tiberghein
A Backward Glance at the Iowa School for the Blind
By – Lois Tiberghien
Class of 1910
In 1899, there were no field workers to travel about the state locating boys and girls who should attend a school for the blind. Those were the horse and buggy days, both in transportation and in news distribution. For that reason too many of us were a few years tardy in entering school.
When little “Yours Truly” became restless for school, my father called upon the County Superintendent for information. A few days later he came home with a catalog of what was then called the “Iowa College for the Blind” and what had formerly been known as the “Iowa Asylum of the Blind”. Surprisingly soon, I was in school.
It was not a college except, perhaps, in the music department; neither should it ever have been called an asylum. That change in name can serve as one instance of gradual growth in understanding. However, the name made little difference until we began entering contests with the public high schools. It then seemed advisable to bring us down a peg. Named and re-named, we seem to still be a school. But what is in a name? What were our qualifications in 1900? Shortly before the turn of the century, the school had been removed from its jurisdiction of a Board of Trustees and together with the mental hospitals and penal institutions had been placed under the State Board of Control. That was the reason our discarded pipe organ was sent to Anamosa. We were well equipped for the times, I am sure, and our scholastic standards were high enough through those years; but we could not become an accredited high school officially under such jurisdiction. Very few colleges accepted our students without extra preparation. It was not until 1910, under the administration of George D. Eaton, that our school and the school for the deaf were placed under the State Board of Education.
Next came the type question. For years, New York Point had been the finger-reading type used in Iowa, and when the uniform type committee elected revised English Braille as the universal type, it took a heap of readjusting. The Iowa School took the change in its stride, one grade at a time in the three R’s and in music.
Our present library was started in 1920. Throughout the years, it has been greatly enlarged to include not only Braille books and magazines but also talking books and books in large type for the sight saving department. The course of study has kept pace with the public schools as far as possible, and the equipment needs have been wonderfully met. I have seen our commercial department grow from its infancy. We may be justly proud of that department.
THE INDUSTRIAL DEPARTMENT
In the earlier days, bead work was highly featured as hand-work in the classrooms. The girls in their sewing classes did much crocheting and knitting. The Home Ec. with the cooking department was added about 1915.
The industrial department was making brooms in 1900 and there was a strong piano tuning department. But the intermediates were making fly nets for the horses and hammocks for the dolls and people. With the coming of automobiles and tractors, the horses and flies practically gave up, and the hammocks -- except for Father Barber’s -- went to the Navy. Plain weaving had already come in to make the school ready for weaving. Our present looms would wonder at the one awkward carpet loom we had in 1900.
The State Commission for the Blind, with its home teachers and its placement department have added much to the happy state of the blind of Iowa. I have seen the school under seven Superintendents and though the above covers only a small fraction of what could be said, we will let it suffice to tell the story.
THE AGE OF STUDENTS AT I. C. B
Vera Everett Cray was our first kindergarten teacher. For years, there were not enough of the wee tots in school at any one time to warrant a kindergarten, but we certainly could have used one long before the autumn of 1928, when the primary cottage was completed.
When I entered school, I was not particularly embarrassed to enter first grade almost old enough for junior high, for there were teen-agers in the class. In those days, there were so many in the school who never should have been admitted. Some of them stayed for years keeping the asylum stamp upon us. Then, too, so many entered school so late because of the lack of information regarding the school and encouragement to enter. I recall one graduating class that ranged in ages from eighteen to thirty. The extension of the privilege to continue in school had to be granted more often than not, but I think in earlier days that fact was just understood.
PLACES AND BUILDINGS
When the school outgrew the home of Mr. Bacon, the founder, some rooms were opened for the school in the capital building at Iowa City. Mr. Tannihill who taught our math for years had started to this school while it was still located in Iowa City. According to the bronze tablet in the front hall by the main office, Captain Thomas Drummond, who was the editor of the Vinton Eagle, 1857-60 and later State Senator, secured the establishment of the College for the Blind in Vinton.
I met an elderly man who told me that he helped build the asylum at Vinton. He explained that he was the little boy that the stone workers sent around to warn the neighbors when they were ready to blast. I feel sure that was when the north wing was build. He said that the bridge over the river had just been built, so the State bought the ferry to bring the stone down the river to the place nearest to the school grounds. A friend, Mrs. Matice Jordan, told me that the middle part of the administration building was all of the school for some time. Eventually, the south wing was built and later, the north wing. As a student, she had lived on the top floor where the north end of the library is now located. The girls had a heater type of stove, and the boys carried wood for them.
It might be interesting to you to know that one of my own classmates was brought to school by horse and buggy from the Cedar Rapids region. We were usually met at the train station by a horse or a team drawn bus.
The drives and walks were of cinders, except the front avenue which was of soft sand. I remember how I hated to start to church with my shoes dusty. We had the iron fence with a nice clicky gate. Did you know that before the streets of Vinton were numbered and lettered, G Avenue in front of the school was called “Asylum Street”?
I remember how happy we were the autumn we returned and found that the lady teachers and students need no longer walk down the board walk to the rest rooms, located at a place between the present location of Palmer Hall and the hospital. The place was kept as sanitary as was possible in those days.
Then I remember how proud and happy we were the Thanksgiving Day that we found silverware on our tables for the first time. Before then, those of us who helped in the dining room dreaded the mornings that the wooden-handled steel knives had to be scoured with brick, which meant two times washed and dried.
We students did much of the work around the school by assignment from the housekeeper, just as we would have our special responsibilities at home, with no pay, but the privilege to learn and to feel useful.
We had no hospital until about 1905. Up to then in the same building where we all slept, ate, went to school, lived our lives nine months of the year, we had “sick rooms”. The present matron’s dining room and the serving kitchen were the big and little sick rooms. The matron who took care of us seventeen little girls must also be a practical nurse, taking care of any girls or lady teachers who were ill, and treating the eyes by direction from Iowa City. The doctors from Iowa City came on the train from time to time and when they operated, sometimes we little girls had to triple-up in bed to give place in the front room of the dormitory, or nursery as it was called then. We had mostly double beds. For a while at least, the matron nurse who also did our mending received twenty-five dollars a month. The teachers lived in our building, too, and some of the help ladies lived east of the kitchen in the basement. The basement was then called the first floor.
There were as many or even more students then than there are now, but we lived in more compact quarters. At that time, we didn’t know that three or four people should not live in a one-window room with a radiator under that window, so we lived through it well.
MORE ABOUT DORMITORY GROUPS
Until the primary cottage was built, the children aged five to twelve and thirteen, according to grade were in the “A” nursery. Until the hospital was built, their matrons took care of the sick. The matron of the junior high group or the “B” nursery girls’ matron taught sewing. The junior high boys had a matron. The older boys had no supervision except the Superintendent’s watchful eye. The head lady teacher, who taught higher English and Latin, was also “Preceptress” to the older girls. She gave them necessary permissions, and was supposed to see that they did their mending and took proper care of themselves. The younger students spoke of the older ones as “the outside girls” or the “outside boys”. Of course, many times they were “the big girls” or “the big boys”.
THE PRICE OF FOOD
Mr. McCure, superintendent, told my father that they could feed students on the average of seven cents per day. Believe it or not, we had aplenty, including biscuits and beefsteak for breakfast every Tuesday. Our menu for each day of the week was pretty well set. For instance, we knew that for Thursday supper, we would have cracked wheat cereal in the deep, flowered soup plates. Friday supper was baked beans. On Saturday, it was a joke that we had hash, soup and society. That was the whole day, and the idea was that because of the ten minutes intermission between the Literary Society program and the business meeting, the only social time of the week, nobody remembered what we had for supper.
Before automobiles and long distance buses, only a few of us went home for Christmas. We were not encouraged to do so, and we made up our work. One of the times I stayed over, we had school even on New Year’s Day. We didn’t like it and threatened to strike. There was the Christmas time during Mr. Palmer’s administration when a break-out of measles found some already started home. We had vacation in February that year. In those older days we did have wonderful times and parties during Christmas week, so it was not so unpleasant to stay as one might think.
BUILDING EXPANSION
I have seen much remodeling of the Main Building since 1900. I have seen the addition of the hospital, the gymnasium, the children’s cottage, the rise and fall of the industrial and grade building, and the addition of both lovely dormitories, besides the new engine house and the swimming pool.
THE REMODELING
Before 1913, the Chapel was on “fourth floor” or top floor, extending the entire width of the section of the building, taking in what are now the typing room, the math room, the science room, and the high school sight saving room.
When I first entered school, we had a pipe organ that was pumped by hand at the back of the organ with a lever. Mr. Erick Hatland used to take care of the pump. I remember that there was a large rock inside of the organ as ballast. Our chapel chairs were quite ordinary chairs fastened in rows on boards that could be moved anywhere. Some time early in the 1900’s, our chapel had its platform lowered to fit a new organ and new seating, the same sets and the same decorative pipes, some of them, that we have now. When they moved the organ downstairs in 1913, they found glued on the back of the organ for windbreak, a newspaper containing the letter of condolence that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany wrote to Mrs. McKinley after the president was assassinated. Half of Wilhelm’s face was left on the paper, too. The present chapel location took the place of at least four classrooms besides requiring an extension that spoiled the wonderful veranda.
Prior to the 1913 remodeling, the superintendent and his family lived in the three rooms south of the main entrance, which now comprise the main office. Before 1906, the superintendent and family ate in the students’ dining room. The teachers continued to do so until later.
The laundry is an old, old building. The present orchestra hall was the engine house, or heating plant. Jordan Hall was the tuning shop, and other shops, or it was the “old brick shop” back of which they boys challenged to meetings to settle arguments.
The students’ dining room is the least changed room. The former tables were long enough that they seated sixteen at a table comfortably. The cups had no handles. They were too thick.
Lightning struck the top of the main building twice while I was in school, and the chimney from the kitchen or bakery burned out a few times. In both cases of the lightning, it was up to the student boys to put out the fire. The first time, Will Miller of Sibley ran against the partition door in the upper hall to reach the hose and the spigot room on the girls’ side of the door of respectability. The second time, Virgil Hoke was the hero who somehow made his way to the roof of the building and took care of the situation. Some of us have had toys made of pieces of the cupola or tower and the old flag pole. One time when the chimney burned out just as the rising bell rang, one of our shop ladies picked up her new shoes and started for the front door.
HERE AND THERE, THIS AND THAT, NOW AND THEN
Through all of those years that Miss Manning taught harmony and music theory, those who completed the work could have entered it as a college credit. I did so with no question.
The school had a wonderful choir in 1900, and before, I’m sure. I have played accompaniments for some of those voices on convention programs in after years.
The school had an orchestra in 1900, but the girls did not play in it. The teacher did not approve of girls playing in an orchestra. He said the guitars and mandolins were for the ladies. But in time, the girls won out.
For a number of years, there were no spellers printed in New York Point which took the place of Braille at that time. Miss Ferris, teacher of third and fourth grades, used to dictate a list of spelling words for us to write and to carry with us to study for the next day. One afternoon, when we had just proofread our list, a crowd of visitors came in and carried them away for souvenirs, and the time was up for the day.
In the early days, with no gymnasium, the younger children did marching and other exercises upstairs in the old chapel. The older girls walked the sanded front avenue and the northeast drive, and cindered drive which the girls called “The Slanting Mill”. The girls did much walking on the verandas. The boys walked the cindered oval and the cemented ditches around the building. The west side was cemented for them. The west veranda was a long one and very nice before the new chapel shortened it. On that veranda, the little girls had a “rockaway”. It was like a long boat that would rock from end to end instead of sideways. The little girls had swings in the north half of the oval. The older girls had swing in the front yard, down toward the lovely arbor-vitae hedge that was inside the iron fence. There were two mounds in the front lawn on which we loved to play, and also a large crescent of arbor-vitae hedge in the north yard where we made playhouses.
Many changes have been made on our campus during the years I have known about the school. Many more will be made as times passes. Yet there is an atmosphere about the place that time can never change -- an atmosphere of friendliness, of sympathetic understanding, and instinctive desire to lend a helping hand to those less fortunate, and an optimistic outlook on life -- the kind of optimism that develops as individuals gain self-assurance and confidence through the enriched school program provided for visually handicapped boys and girls in Iowa.
Miss Tiberghien was born: January 30, 1888
