 Hello everyone, I hope you're here to hear about Aunt Connolly and not just get away to Super Bowl. Long time no see. So I want to welcome all of you, thank you for coming. My name is Carolyn Gould, I'm president of the Chittenden County Historical Society. And I'm just going to make a few comments before introducing Elise Gallette who is going to introduce our speaker. Just some basic information. The boys and girls bathrooms are in the front. You take a right, go to the left for the boys and the right for the girls. And we have refreshments afterwards for all of you. And I want to thank Isabella from TownMeetingTV who is recording this presentation. We are now recording all of our presentations and we post the link on Facebook. We're also going to put it up on our website which is cchsbt.org. And you can find information posted there. You can also find ways of joining our organization. If you're interested in taking a more active part and would like to serve on a committee or to maybe join as a member of the board, please contact me. My name's all over the place. But it would be cchpresident at gmail.com. We'd love to talk to you. We have a content-driven organization. We don't have a museum. But we do have a bulletin that appears five times a year. And we have these talks that happen about every other month. So we also give research grants to lay historians or to professional historians, generally lay historians, who are looking to research a specific topic about Chittenden County history. And the deadline for next year's awards is June 1st. And the person to contact is Tom Donahue, Rager 10 Tom. And currently we've been the East Monitor Barn. I don't know how many of you have heard about East Monitor Barn. Well, one of the people there who's working tonight has come this year, Grant for Sydney. And he's going to be doing a presentation probably next year on Charles Miller, who is one of the few barn architects we know of. And so we're really looking forward to this. I'd like to, first of all, dedicate this presentation. I never do this. This is a one-off. But I'm dedicating this presentation to my friend Pam Pospisil's guide dog, Bianca. And this is not Bianca. This is life-like. Bianca, Pam and I are husband and wife as members of the Dragon Heart of the Month Dragon Boat Racing Team. And we went to Hungary in 2018 to participate in the Club Crew World Championships. And Bianca came to every practice, and Bianca went to Hungary. And so Bianca was so loved by all of us that when she passed it was horrible for Pam. But it was also really sad for all of us who just love this dog. And now a couple of years later, light has come into her life as light. Pam's guide dog who's here today. So I just wanted to make that dedication because how often do you get to acknowledge a dog? It's cool. So, without any more blithering on my part, I'd like to introduce one of our board members, Elise Gayet, who has put together this presentation. And Elise. Hi. Thank you. You've been thoughtful for a duration. Thank you very much. So it's, how many people have been in high school before? I haven't. So it's kind of interesting, isn't it? Yes, it is. Seeing the architecture and how they put it together. Yeah. And they have donated this space to us. So thank you very much to Burlington High School for donating everything that had to do with this program. And I'm so happy, it is my pleasure to introduce John Thomas, who is currently the Director of Development for the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. He's originally from Ohio. He's lived in Vermont since 1992 and has a BA and an MA in history from the University of Vermont. Over the years, he tells us he has worked on many social and cultural history projects including Burlington's Urban Manual, UVM student movements and protests, the Masonic influence on early UVM. In his graduate thesis, he's focused on the meditated practices of 19th century Protestant women. It sounds like you could be giving a lot of talks in the County's Journal Society. But one of his proudest to be a part of history projects was spearheading the fifth grade student history project in South Burlington Central School to rally the community to support the developer's interest in raising the school for support. It was to counter the developer's interest in raising the school, yes. Exactly. So now Central School once saved, faced with student work. He's married, has two amazing and brilliant daughters. Are we the rest of the year? No. The story of Ian Connolly, he's telling today he's a part of a larger project to create more awareness of an accessibility in Burlington for those with impaired vision. Please welcome John Thomas. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to test my mic levels. Is this better or is it better if I just speak like this? Microphone? Microphone? All right, excellent. Thank you. So thank you everybody for being here on this beautiful sunny Super Bowl Sunday. That will be the second funnest thing of today. This will be number one. You will find out. So I'm honored to be here to get to tell the story of Ian Connolly because she's an important person in Vermont history. There was a time when, I don't know if it's fair to say most people, but I think most people in Vermont knew her. She was a celebrity in the state and she's been forgotten in the history of what she helped create. I work for the organization that she helped breathe life into. She's the living experience that informs much of what we do and she was lost in time. So this is a new story for all of us and I'm glad that you're here to hear it and I hope that I can correct some of the record. She deserves to be known about and honored for the work that she did as well as some other people who helped what she did take place. So I want to expand a little bit about my slideshow. This is maybe the most beautiful slide. It's more of a slideshow to keep me on track and from digressions and to keep the story going. So my resources for this, number one is a newspaper database. So you're going to find this is sort of like a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. And please nobody feel that you need to read all of them because I probably will go past a slide before you're done reading. If you want a copy of my slides, I'm happy to get that for you. But I'm not putting a slide up hoping everybody's going to read these articles because some of them are kind of long and they're just to kind of keep me talking about some points that I probably will forget. So that's explaining my slideshow. And I also need to mention that I'm going to be talking about the beginnings of a little bit about them of two organizations that are alive and well today and integral to the health and well being of the Vermont community. This story takes place more than 100 years ago. None of the people in these organizations knew about Ann Connolly. So any painful or uncomfortable pieces of the story cannot be blamed on anybody today. And this is my disclaimer so I have a job at the end of my presentation. So the VABVI and the DBVI, which is our state counterpart, do incredible work and their success, longevity, stability begin with Ann Connolly's experience. So it's, you know, we can all guess at the end why she might have been forgotten in the story. So I guess that's it. So I can jump in. Ann Connolly, this is her. This is a picture of her taken in 1931. Pioneer the unorganized area, which will make sense a little bit later on. And she's the first field teacher for the Vermont Association for the Blind. She's born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She's born blind. 1889, as far as I know, she has a mom and dad and one sister, but I know very little about her family. She said she had no formal education until she entered the Overbrook School, the Pennsylvania Institution for Instruction of the Blind at Overbrook. She enters there when she's 12. So this place started in 1832. It's an old institution. It just moved to this large facility outside Philadelphia in 1899. So I think this is right after Ann goes there, I think right after this place happens or they moved to this large facility. I didn't include all the pictures. This is a very impressive place and they teach all sorts of skills for blind people to learn to hopefully go out and find employment with. Overbrook became famous for teaching blind students to become athletes. All of these grounds, this is an older picture, these get converted to athletic fields around the place. And it's still out there today. So she's there at age 12. This is a bit of her timeline before she goes to Vermont. So she enters Overbrook at age 12. Her father passes away when she's 14, leaves the family with no financial support, and learns the handicrafts at the school that she then makes and sells over the summers to earn. She pays for her own clothing and the railroad fare back to school. Graduates from Overbrook, 1909 at the age of 19. Her first job, this is all coming from her own story. And I have to say, the one person who'd be so excited to have her story told would be Ann Connolly because she's told her story many, many times in the paper, Vermont paper. So when she graduate, she's first trained for wild care for a child with disabilities. That didn't last long. She entered into the Westchester State Normal School. She says she's the only blind student there out of like 987 students. I rounded up to 1,000. She's there for a year. She said this was to help her learn to be around a predominantly sighted population. She then goes on. She's employed for two years by the Catholic Institute for the Blind in New York. She's a teacher of manual training. So manual training is what she's learned at Overbrook. And it's her teaching others to cane chairs, to weave, to sew. She types. She knows braille. She also knows something called the moon's writing system. It's a raised writing system. There are other things. It's called manual training. It's also called handicrafts. I'll refer to this work as handicrafts because it kind of changes depending on where it's being employed and what kind of facilities they have. So it's easier to say handicrafts. And then after she's two years at the Catholic Institute, she enters the lighthouse. That's in New York City to study basketry weaving, switchboard operating, braille shorthand and typewriting. So the lighthouse has a pivotal impact on who she is, what she goes on to do, who she is as an adult, what she does in Vermont. Two years in the lighthouse began packed on Anne among the things there that really influence her. And I'll explain more about the lighthouse a couple of slides forward. She is there working in programs that are completely run by blind people. And she also joins women's clubs there that are blind women. So they're sharing ideas of the day. They talk about whatever is going on at the time. And so what's going on at the time? Progressive era. Just quickly over it, maybe everybody in here knows this already. Anne, which is really great about this room. If you haven't seen this history timeline, we're in that corner over there. So the Progressive Era, 1890 to 1920s. This is essentially Anne's born in 1889. She's born and she's growing up. She is formed by the Progressive Era. Progressive Era is marked by its period of social reform. Predominantly led by many strong social reform minded women. They're dealing with social problems that come out of the late 19th century industrialization. And this is just a few I listed up there. Workers' rights, consumer protections, increased aid to people in need. There's a lot of charity work. They're beginning to look around and see so many people are in need. This is post-Roberts' era. They want to do something to help. Reform in women's clothing. That's a great one. Corsets are extremely bad for women's health. And so there's a reform movement to get rid of those. Many more reforms. Actually, I know we have a lot of historians in here. So the Progressive Era. Does anybody have some favorite aspect of the Progressive Era they want to shout out? What's a reform that took place then? Suffrage. Yes, suffrage. Women's right to vote. And that's interesting because that's a huge push. And a number of these groups will get together and say, OK, first thing, we're going to talk about our cause, but we can't tie it to suffrage. So that's a real dividing point for some people. In Vermont, they have anti-suffrage groups because they don't want to be associated with being radicals. Female activists establish new professions in social work and public health. Jane Adams in Chicago and the Hall House. That is hugely influential in the late 19th century, shaping these women who come in and are doing more reform work at the turn of the century. Hall House is created to help poor women and children. Actually, I think is where the field of social work develops. I think the position of social worker comes out of Hall House. It's hugely influential. Anne Connolly grows up in this area. She's shaped by all of these ideas. She's shaped by these strong women around here, shaped by the social milieu and movements of the time in addition to her personal experiences. This is crucial at the bottom. Anne has helped through her career by strong reform-minded women, as you'll see throughout this. She works with women's groups. Pretty much everything she's done or she will go on to do, she's helped by a single influential woman or women's groups. Is she doing this in New York? Yes. At that point, that formation is happening in New York. The lighthouse she spends two years in New York and she goes from the lighthouse to Vermont. So those two formative years, I think so. So among the influential women of the period and in our story is Winifred Hull. She's the daughter of Henry Hull. He's a well-to-do successful publisher in New York City in the late 19th century. He has a summer home in Burlington. This is how the story reaches Vermont. The Hulls, summered in Vermont starting in the 1870s. Winifred tells a story, a favorite childhood story is them being at Lake Dunmore and her having a toothache which forced her parents to take her on a long carriage ride to Middlebury and it was magical. And she talks about this, this really great childhood experience. So they have a long connection to Vermont. She's the founder of the lighthouse. And I have to quickly tell you this story because it's a great story. Winifred Hull and her siblings are born into privilege. They are wealthy. Their father is a wealthy guy. The Hulls are artistic. They're cultured. They raise their kids with knowledge of classical music and opera and sculpture and they're being exposed to a number of great cultural leaders. So these kids have this unique upbringing and privilege in jumping forward quickly. Winifred and her sister are in, they're touring around Europe. They're looking for a place to study Italian so they end up in Italy. And these are the kind of things they can do. When her mother dies, the doctor tells her dad, like you, you're experiencing grief. You need to go to Europe and just seclude yourself. So they do this all the time. One of the sons has an interesting classical music. So he and his sister just tour Europe finding the greatest concerts that they can. It's like 1901 or so. So anyhow, Winifred and her sister are in Italy studying Italian and they go to an opera and they see a group of people let in, seated and they watch them through this and they are watching that it's, I think it's a group of young men. They're really enjoying the show. And they discover in this that this group of young men, they're blind. And so her story is that she's watching and she's telling her sister, look at this, look at this. And she's already, she's had an earlier experience in the state where she is tuned into the needs of the blind. So she's sitting there in this opera house seeing these blind kids enjoying the show and she asks about it afterwards. She asks why are they there or how they came in and she learns that there's a program in Venice where they take extra, they have tickets set aside for the blind to come to the shows. And Winifred and her sister are amazed and they are, you know, this is this point where she just gets her passion for what she does the rest of her life. She says, we're going to go back to New York and we're going to create this kind of a club in New York City. We can do this. And her sister agrees with her just by squeezing her hand. That's what Winifred says. So they come back and she does this. They go around. They find there are extra tickets. They try to get tickets for everything from theater to academic lectures. Anything that's educational that can deliver culture to people. She gets all of these tickets. She gets this idea. She hands it over to the New York, I think it's called a new, she refers to the New York School of Blind. I'm not that familiar with it. But what she says is they said, thanks, we'll take it from here. And weeks go by and nothing happens, nothing happens. And she realizes that nothing's going to happen. That she writes this in her biography that there are the benevolent, well-meaning keepers of the blind who really don't like these folks, her and her sister showing up with a new idea that's going to ask them to do something different. And what they're doing is saying, blind people can come out and attend all of these social events. They should be part of what we're doing. That's really what they're proposing. And she says the school was there keeping blind people kind of locked away. So it's an interesting thing that she realizes. And she goes back and well, she doesn't go back. She just takes her idea back and her and her sister put it together. So they just club together. That's for blind people in New York to get free tickets to go to the theater. And they discover very quickly that blind people, as they told her, we love to be going to the shows, but we would really like to get jobs. Much of our time is spent in idleness. Social isolation is a huge part of blindness. And they learn about this. Winifred and her sister learn about it. So they realize they need to form something else. They end up forming the New York Association for the Blind, which was meant to focus on employment and how they can help blind people find employment. It then leads to her learning how to cane shares and doing all that handicraft work. And she starts to train some blind people in her house. She actually goes to a school to learn how to do it. She comes back. This is from England. She comes back, sets up her first practice effort in her house. She teaches a few blind people. She teaches them to teach others and really, from there, it spreads into what becomes an international movement. Lighthouse International grows from Winifred's one table and one room in her house. Her story is funny. It takes over. The word lighthouse was given by the blind people who were coming from New York to go to the Holtz House because it's a happening. If you read it, it could be 1967 London. They're showing up there. All these blind people are meeting other blind people. You have the Holtz who are supporting them, who are encouraging them, their advocates, saying you could do all sorts of things that you want to do and you're going to learn how to do it here. We'll teach you how to train other people to do this, other blind people. So it's a fire that is lit that just grows and grows. Literally to the point where one of the things that they do is they're taking census work in New York. They're trying to find blind people. From this point in time, it's interesting to look back where this is a time when a lot of people have the attitude that it's fine to have a shut-in. If you have a blind person in your family and you got to go to work, it's okay to lock them in the house. It's okay to lock them in a room. Or some people don't want to tell other people that they have a blind family member. So the survey work is out trying to find the blind people in the city. And her training of blind people to do this work is so successful that Winifred ends up just being there handling other business. And the survey work across the city is being done by teams of blind people. Ann Connolly is in all of this. She is working with blind people doing blind-managed projects. So Winifred Holt, she starts the Lighthouse of the Blind in New York, starts the New York Association for the Blind. This is around 1905, 1907. What also is really great about her that I find great is that she's born into privilege, she doesn't have to do these things. There are so many other paths she could choose to do and she is just sparked. This is her mission. She writes an article about how this all comes about. She writes this article on the formation of the New York Association for the Blind. If you look at it, it's the template for the Vermont Association for the Blind. And what I love about it is she's created this thing that is just successful and so profoundly impactful for blind people and she says, I've written all the simple ways this has begun because anybody can do this. I am nobody special. Granted, she did have a lot of resources to start with but she lays out in her essay the size of the room they had. We have one table and she's explaining that you could do this out of your house. You could do this like we have done it. So there's this great, interesting kind of can-do spirit in the beginning of the field where they're discovering that they can make a difference. So she's in, her dad has the summer home. She comes up to Burlington in the summers. She's up here and she gives this actually, she's here in November so there I'm wrong. She's up here in the winter and she gives a speech at Edmunds High School about what she's done about the formation of the New York Association of the Blind. She's doing it to encourage a formation of a similar organization in Vermont. So she gives a talk at Edmunds November 1912. Elsie Brown who's similar to Winifred. Elsie Brown lives in Fernhill, end of North Prospect. That's a New York family. They come up in the summer in Vermont. They open their house up at Fernhill. I'm not sure how Elsie's I think probably similar in age. She's another young person who's active and realizes she can make a difference and she's very involved up here in the fallout after the investigation of the child labor of the Winooski Middles and she's involved in the Visiting Nurses Association. I'm thinking the V&A currently must know a lot about Elsie Brown because she's their big instigator in the beginning, their big catalyst. Anyhow, Elsie Brown's at this talk that Winifred gives. Elsie Brown becomes this active force in that first year of keeping the VAB going. The VAB is formed at this talk right afterwards. So Winifred Holt mentions Elsie Brown as the driver in the first year of forming the VAB. Elsie Brown disappears after that. I have to note that the first teacher who was hired to teach in Burlington is Roy Klukea. He's hired by Elsie Brown. He's been mentioned because he's the first and he also disappears after two months. He teaches for just July and August, 1913. He comes from the Perkins School, Elsie writes to Perkins. Vermont has been sending some of its blind students to the Perkins School in Massachusetts since like the 1840s. So that's what we have been doing with blind students. I'm not really sure the criteria of how somebody gets chosen to get to go to Perkins. I think they have to show a lot of promise. Using taxpayer money to send students to Perkins becomes a political issue like in the 1850s. So some candidates are saying like, this guy's for sending blind people away and you're dying. Is that right? So that's how it's going here. Roy Klukea is one of the students that gets sent from Cambridge, Vermont, studies at Perkins. He's a standout athlete too. He comes back, does teaching. I don't know if something, I don't know if he, I'm not sure what happens with him. But Winifred or Elsie Brown writes to Perkins again. He says, you have somebody else you can send us. But meanwhile, while this is happening in Burlington, in St. Albans, you have a counterpart of Winifred Holt. And I'm sorry I don't have a younger picture of her, but this is Anna Smith. It's a governor's wife, Edwin Smith's wife. This is from her obituary. I couldn't find an earlier picture, but she's from the late 19th century. She's a reform-minded young woman, or, yeah, young woman. And in St. Albans, she's involved in many reform projects or aid to the needy projects, social aid projects. She, one of the interesting things she does, she hosts Minnie G. Hayes, who's a reformer, activist, well-known, nationally well-known. She speaks at the Smith home on the reform of women's clothing, corsets. And in the newspaper they say, it's open to the public, which I think is very cool, that the Smiths are in their house to have this reformer there, and they say anybody can come. And the paper reports that they were happy to see that several men attended the talk. So Anna Smith has an aunt named Catherine Scranton. And Catherine Scranton is of the town, the city name, Scranton P.A. The Smiths are related to the Scrantons. These are two prominent railroad owning families that merge together through marriage. And I'm not really sure how Anna Smith knows about Ann Connolly, whether they went to Overbrook and said, who's an exceptional student? We want to be involved in the work for the blind. We want to start this in St. Albans. Can you recommend somebody? I'm not sure. Ann Connolly comes from Scranton. Anna Smith, the Smith family, has a connection to Scranton. But we also know that Ann Connolly is in New York at the lighthouse. So it's a good possibility that Anna Smith knows Winifred Holt because they're well-to-do, wealthy, social-like people with reform in mind. So I'm not quite sure the connection to Ann Connolly, but Anna Smith brings Ann Connolly to St. Albans in 1913. And Anna Smith is the one who starts the first school for the blind in Franklin County by bringing Ann there. So this is a picture that shows up in the paper of the first school in St. Albans. This is Ann Connolly. She's 22. So this would be her coming straight from two years at the lighthouse. It's at the Stranahan Club. Let's see. It runs for three months. By Ann's own account, she said that she comes up and the Vermont Association for the Blind pays her for three months, $50 a month. And when the money runs out, when the money runs out, the training would run out. The schools would close because it's entirely privately funded. But she stays in the state because she wants to keep this going. And she fund raises. She is her own development person. She's raising the money. She's doing her publicity. She's very savvy with the media. And she stays here for two years, completely on her own efforts. The people who brought her here probably would have been okay. Like, okay, we paid you for this much time and we did great work. The newspapers reported on the classes. They also followed on what some of the people end up doing and says they all became assets to their community. You have basketry going on here. Ann Connolly is a genius at raising public awareness about the needs of blind people. And the capabilities of blind people. As she says, she's expanding perceptions. And she also knows that people don't know very much about what she's talking about. She says, she'll later describe this as an unorganized territory. She's a pioneer here. So if we step back from the Vermont that we know today to this Vermont, this Vermont is, or at least much of it, is agriculturally dominated. And the needs of the blind aren't too much of a concern of too many people. Not just the blind, maybe many others. It's not a wealthy state. There's a small state budget. There's limited money to support social needs. These things are brand new and being pitched to the state to support. I'm not sure when the home for the destitute kids starts in Burlington. There's late 19th century efforts. But Ann herself talks about being here, changing ideas, making people see what's possible. So money runs out in St. Albans. She comes down to Burlington. And she raises money to start a class in this building. It's a star hose building on North Winooski Avenue. This starts 1914. I believe she runs a class there for four months. And the plan, what she does is three months in St. Albans, four months in Burlington. She goes back and does three months in St. Albans again. I could say in this period she's not quite as famous as she's going to get. But she's really good about writing a newspaper and saying, this is what I'm going to be doing. All of these classes that she starts are open to the public because she wants everybody to come in and see what's possible. She also wants to encourage the public to buy the items that the students are making. And she'll explain they're learning how to do this, but they need to be able to sell it. So your purchasing of their items will help this work. She ends up, the money runs out. She ends up in these last years that she's here talking to the paper saying really the only way this is going to work in Vermont is if the state gets involved. Private funding isn't going to carry this far enough. The state needs to be involved. And that's really interesting to me because the state at this point probably doesn't want to know anything about it, doesn't want to be involved, doesn't have a lot of money to spend. And she's saying it out there very early, 1915. So she leaves Vermont. She takes a job with the New York Association for the Blind. We remember it started by Winifred Holt. She's got this close association with Mrs. Holt for a long time. While she's gone, we refer back to our corner over there, World War I happens. This has a dramatic impact on the world of blindness and also on Ann's story in Vermont. The war ends up creating a wave of newly blinded soldiers, of men that in turn fuels efforts to help them, to figure out what we can do with all these blind veterans. One of the things that develops in that is the training of guide dogs. It starts in Germany. I'll pick up the story later. That plays a role in Ann's time here. And during World War I, Ann teaches Braille to Red Cross workers in New York. They in turn are creating Braille books for the blinded veterans. I threw this in. This is related to the guide dog training. This is the first newspaper article that shows up referring to the Germans' training guide dogs. It's this new thing. And it's great. It's a funny article because there's all sorts of anti-German statements in it, but they're saying this is this genius thing that they figured out and maybe we should take this idea to the United States. And they also explain in this article, this is 1918 by the way, they explain in the article that the German people that figured out the training program got the idea by some blind beggars in, I can't remember the name of which city they're in, but there were beggars in town who had trained their own dogs to lead them from their homes to their places. So I was intrigued by that. Sort of, you know, we saw them doing it. We figured we could turn it into an official program. I did some newspaper database searching in the U.S. and found a series of stories through the 19th century of people who have trained their dogs, blind guy in Atlanta, blind guy in Oklahoma, a family of blind people in another place who has a dog. So it's been, you know, dogs have been trained for a long time, but there's no official sort of program to train them. But I'm interested in the sharing of an idea and how somebody can take an idea and either it spreads among people or this particular article was printed in newspapers probably in every state in the United States. There's hundreds of these that I found in the database. So the point of that being, all these other states saw this same idea, this idea of the training of the dogs was everywhere. But it only was like one guy who finally said, oh, we should bring that here. So that's an interesting thing to me along with how does somebody become forgotten in the historical record. Okay, so World War I put a bookmark on that, The Dogs. Anne's in New York, 1915 through 1923. She organizes the work for the blind in the cities of Utica, Syracuse, Watertown, Cooperstown, the counties of Nassau and Westchester. Organizing the work for the blind. So what that involves, and this is what she did in Vermont. She explained when she came to St. Albans, she will find the people who are going to be her helpers, basically. In this case, it was Anna Smith back in St. Albans. She'll usually work with a church and she needs somebody to assist her and they begin to look for blind people. They put the word out, we're looking for blind people. It seems a little crazy to me at this point from where we are, but in Vermont, and I'm sure this happened in upstate New York because she has some examples where this is still a time when people are fine with their shut-ins. Somebody's blind in the family and they're at home and they don't need to go anywhere. They have no support other than what the family can do. So Anne's working through churches and developing trust and getting people to be okay with allowing Anne to come talk to their blind family member and maybe present them with the opportunity to go to a school. Not every family agrees. So the work for the blind is finding the blind people, convincing people to come to a class. If they can't physically get to the class, Anne will go to their home and work with them. In Vermont, she had examples of working with many very elderly people who were blind who hadn't been out of their house in a long time and as she said, she could at least go and have a friendly visit and lift them because social isolation is devastating. So she was pushing for a program before the state was ready for that program. So she does all this work in New York. Funds run out again. So this is the theme of her sort of financial instability which is probably the case for women at the period in general. A blind woman who is also single. She's got to make her own way. Funds run out for the New York Association for the Blind. She joins the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind and she starts working this new house that they open in Yonkers and she's overseeing the workshops for women, young women and older women who are doing the various handicraft work. I included this because they honored her. When she was leaving the New York Association for the Blind in Yonkers, she was given this honorary travel kit for Peter's Guild and I just included it because that's a rare occasion when somebody honored her as she was moving on to her next work. Excuse me for a minute. I'm way behind in flipping my panels here. So she goes to work for the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind. She works there up until 1923 and another thing I want to emphasize is these groups that she's working for are like out of Vermont. I think the thing that I want to emphasize to everybody is all of this is happening outside of Vermont. In Vermont, almost nothing is happening. The New York Guild for the Jewish Blind is an advanced organization at this point when Anne's working for them to the point that they already have multiple social groups of just women that I saw one picture where they had probably like 50 blind women down at the beach and they were doing, it was tug of war day. One group is dressed all in black and they're in the water and the other group is dressed all in white and they're trying to pull each other back and forth. So that's a complex social outing and Anne's part of it. I can't imagine how amazing it would be for her to be around blind colleagues and having this incredible day out with a group of blind women having fun at the beach. And again I'll say nothing like this exists in Vermont. So she's working there. She leaves there in 1923 to start work in Virginia. Same thing. Organizing work for the blind. Interesting here. There's segregated classes there. So she works with a black teacher of the blind, Hattie Willis, who, I don't know anything about her other than this but I bet she's got a really interesting story to look into as well. Anne is paid for by the state and then she's loaned out to different cities to organize the work. And it's interesting. This is another unorganized area as she would call it. This is an interesting blurb where this is her coming back but she had done this exploratory trip with some other people into North and South Carolina looking at their work for the blind there. It's funny because she comes back and it says that she's going to assist Mrs. Carpenter in collecting the water refund. I threw that in there to show sort of the level in which they were aggressively trying to build their or creatively trying to build their programs. The Roanoke Water Department had some issue where there was a water refund and the Lions and the group that Anne was with approached them and said, you know, if we could have that refund. It was $15,000. It's a lot of money at the time. This is 1926, I think, or 25. They end up winning. They end up getting the money and the money is put into building a workshop for the blind in Roanoke where they build brooms and mattresses. It's an investment in this industrial center. I like it because Anne does a little bit of that when she comes back to Vermont and talks to the Burlington City Council. So this is all going on in Virginia. Also thinking that Anne is being exposed to a lot of diverse groups of people. Okay, so meanwhile, back in Vermont, I've emphasized nothing's really going on. There is no work for the blind taking place. The VAB goes to sleep as Anne says. When she leaves the state, the VAB does nothing else. They talk about they need money. They talk about there's work to be done. They talk about the need for fundraising, but then World War I hits and the VAB goes to sleep. They put their money in a bank account and just kind of turn everything on dim. Okay, so this is now 1925 that we're at. Helen Keller is touring New England to raise interest in money for the American Foundation for the Blind. That's an organization started, I think, in 1921 in reaction to the high rate of blinded soldiers. They came together to try to do something. So Helen Keller is out raising money for the AFB. She tours Vermont. She has a show of blind people, so she has a blind violinist and some blind vocalists, and she does a stage show with them, and she speaks at length about the devastating effects of social isolation. It's an interesting thing throughout all of it. She's attracting huge crowds. Obviously, she's a big celebrity, and this is a huge phrase they use all the time. Help the blind to help themselves. That's still something we all understand and get, but at the time it's particularly powerful because there's more suspicion about charity and there's more of an attitude about giving away things for free to people and helping them to help themselves. What's the Christian phrase? Teach a man to fish? It's related to that because much of this work is fueled with Christian values. The women who are doing this work often see themselves as doing kind of missionary work, except for Winifred Holt. In her story she tells, this is so unusual, because there's a strong religiosity to much of what is going on in these early days, or at least their sense of doing Christian charity work. Winifred Holt says, I'm at school and I learned from my religious teacher that babies go to hell and I wanted nothing more to do with this. And she puts that in her biography. That's an amazing statement to make in 1905. Anyhow, so Helen Keller does this tour through Vermont and her talk in Burlington, which I believe takes place at UVM. Members of the VAB attend that show, that presentation, and they agree at it, they need afterwards and they agree that they need to revive the VAB as a statewide service delivering organization. Prior to that they only worked in Shitton County and Franklin County. So our organization to this day marks its start, our rebirth you could say to this 1926 tour of Helen Keller through the state. So Helen Keller's there. Ann is still in Virginia. This is great. So Ann's in Virginia and this is her first article she writes. It shows up in the Outlook for the Blind, which is the trade journal put out by the Perkins School for the blind field, the workers of the blind. And it's, her essay is amazing. Number one, because she writes, she types, she types in Braille and her writing is great. But she's also describing her role in what she does in her work. And it explains a lot about her mind. So I'm going to read you some of the things she, one of the really interesting things she addresses is the work in an organized location versus an unorganized location. Organized are all these urban centers that she's been in. And basically in an organized place, she said, I can go in as a field teacher and do this thing with the people I'm working with and everything else is taken care of by someone else who has a job in the organization. But in an unorganized place, she has to do everything. So she writes, the unorganized territories occupy the smaller towns with a scattered population. Here the number of blind is comparatively small and the organizations for welfare work are few. Here the home teacher is the pioneer in the advancement of the cause. There are no paid workers to meet the various situations constantly arising and the home teacher must do all the other work in addition to instructing pupils. It's up to the home teacher to seek out the blind as best she can. The state or association secretary and directors may be miles away. That's if there's one that exists. And even though Uncle Sam does carry news fast, the special situation cannot wait for correspondence and telephone and telegraphs are not always satisfactory. So the home teacher must solve the problem without aid. In such a community, the home teacher must educate the public for she is the only one who has the knowledge. She is the Bureau of Information and should be a living example of what a normal blind person should be. The reputation of the blind and the organization depends entirely on the conduct of a home teacher. So beware of false steps in the path of righteousness. A couple of things out of there that are important to know about her is she feels strongly that the blind teach the blind best. The best education for the blind should come from a blind person. That and her description here also is her being independent out in the field. This is still very much a man's world. She's an independent woman moving out here. She's blind and she's making decisions on her own out in the field. So she has a great degree of independence and authority over what she's doing. She goes on and describes some of the qualities that are needed. And I'll just read a few. She goes about knowing various typewriting, different scripts, the different handicrafts you should know. She says it's important to have common sense, good judgment, tact, diplomacy, a good moral character, patience, perseverance, good disposition, a good sense of humor, plenty of initiative, and you should be neat in appearance and have a magnetic personality. So, and this is... She's a representation. She's a representative of blind people. And I mentioned this guy, Roy Klukea, earlier. He was the first person hired in Burlington. He leaves Burlington for a job with the Wisconsin School for the Blind. And I found a letter in the Perkins correspondence in the Perkins archives where the director of Perkins, Roy Klukea is a graduate. Okay. How many minutes? 10 left. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm going to jump way ahead. This is an important article and I'm always curious if anybody in Vermont read it. So she leaves Virginia after writing that article. She leaves her career and she takes on a new career of selling insurance in Pennsylvania. It's a correspondence course through the Hadley School. Hadley Correspondent, she meets Morris Frank in this period. He's the first guy with the trained guide dog. He brings the program back to Tennessee, the scene I. And she does this for a while and then she's hired by Helen Keller to be her typist for six weeks. So Ann moves out into Helen Keller's house in Long Island and is a typist for six weeks. But I think that was a scouting mission because this plan, Helen Keller is a rep for the AFB. And in September 27, 1927, Ann is asked by the American Foundation for the Blind to return to Vermont to organize the work for the blind. And this is all being done with the goal of impressing the state to give a large appropriation to support work for the blind in Vermont. So I think that Ann's out at Helen Keller's place. So Ann, so Helen Keller can check her out and give her the stamp of approval. Then Ann comes back up here with Charles Hayes and an official to AFB. And they meet with state officials. They meet with the governor. They meet with this guy, William Dyer, who I might not get the chance to talk about, but he's great. And she gives this impassioned speech about how this work needs to be resumed. It is her work. She feels ownership about it that she left it behind in 1914. So they authorize her to raise up to $5,000 to go around and raise awareness about this and to do a survey in the state. All being done so the state can see if there's really a need for state support in the program. The American Foundation of the Blind pays for Ann's work during this time. This is an address she has in Burlington at the time. And I add these little bits. This is a bit about the meeting with the state. This kind of headline, Miss Connolly Coming Back to Help the Blind, that shows up in newspapers around Vermont. She's known about it and people are excited that she's coming back. Right after she has that meeting, the flood hits, and she says no one in the state can help her. She needs an assistant to drive her around the state. So she said, I could have left the state because everybody just kind of ignored her. They were hit by a disaster. She said, if I left the state, I felt that the work would just be dropped. So she contacts the AFB. They come back up and someone drives her around the state for several months. That's a letter which we won't have time to go into, but it's a letter that somebody wrote into this column in the free press where they encountered Anne Connolly out in the wild. I'd say out in the wild, out in the field, she's doing this radio giveaway program for the AFB, which is great because they're connecting blind people who've been hit by the flood to radio so they can be connected to the world. Today we have something called a smart program where we teach the use of iPads and iPhones and whatnot so blind people can be connected to the world. So this is an earlier version, 1927. She then, 1928, she's trying to build up this case to get state funding. She writes another article in the Outlook for the Blind is the Vermont Association for the Blind Essential. The answer is yes. She ordered, one of the, I love this, this is one of the first things she organizes, an out of state trip for blind women to this vacation house that Helen Keller set up in New York. And I can only imagine that being rather shocking to read, some of the Vermonters at the time read it, like really? They're going away on a vacation? So that's pretty cool. She also does this, she talks to school, she's all over the state talking and one of the things she does is she can tell people that she can tell what coins they have in their hands by the sound of two coins hitting each other. So they're impressed by that and this guy, they write in the article that they, that she guessed that he was about five feet, 11 inches, and weighed 200 pounds, but she failed to note his color of skin because she said frankly that means nothing whatsoever to her. I thought that was a very cool statement to add in there too. Then that little article on the other side, when she's in Burlington, she moves her classes to City Hall to raise awareness, which is just such a cool PR move. She gets room 17 in City Hall, the VAB opens up their office there and she opens up her training school there that she wants tourists to Burlington to know about to be able to come in because she always has the focus on raising awareness of blindness. So, we're in 1928. 1929, this is just a quick article that's important to see. This comes up in the paper. A recent survey done. New era starting, the era of handicrafts is ending. New jobs are opening up. Blind people now can be taught to do kindergarten works, stenography, dictaphone operating, social service work, editing. There's a whole new field of vocations opening up. And so, this is important to know because handicrafts are the center of what the lighthouse does. So, we're at 1929. Up to this point, Ann's just been promoting, trying to impress the state that there's this need for a state appropriation to keep this work going. And the return of Winifred Holt, mother, she's now married. This was her in 1929. I suspect she's always had a contact to Ann because she comes here in the summers. Ann's here. And Winifred Holt had this huge impact on Ann when she was younger. Winifred Holt at some point meets with Ann. Ann's doing all this promotional work around the state. Winifred Holt says, you know, you should build a lighthouse in Vermont. I mean in Burlington. Up to this point, there isn't necessarily a big plan like that. Ann's just surveying the state. She's visiting a lot of people and doing various work, but this is now suddenly a big project. This is a central project. Winifred Holt suggests build a lighthouse in Burlington and she lays out $2,000 for it, which is a huge sum of money. So, you can see here the governor's part of this meeting. He's in on it. Winifred Holt's behind it. She has a lot of clout. She's a very influential person in the world of the blind. Her husband's in on it. Ann's at the meeting. They then take this idea to the VAB. The VAB meets and hears about it. They vote, yes, this is great. So, Ann is now sent out to raise something like $10,000 across the state to kick off the lighthouse. The idea is that the lighthouse would be this industrial training center in Burlington in the Taft School on Pearl Street. That's what they wanted in. Part of it would be boarding. Counties would send their blind people to Burlington to be trained there and then they would hopefully go out and find employment with what they've been trained in. It's a very expensive plan. A lighthouse is going to be expensive and but it's okay. Ann's okay to work on this and just a minor thing happens too. September the stock market crashes and Ann leaves for a month. She's been planning this. On the background, she's planning to leave the state to go train with a new guide dog. She leaves the state, goes to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, meets her new dog, German Shepherd Betty. While she's away training, she's writing letters back to these Vermont cities saying, this is what I'm doing. I'm in this program. I'm getting a guide dog. It's a new program. It's going to be my new eyes. When I come back, let's set up a date and we can have a meet Betty Day at City Hall. She's so clever with how she presents what she's doing and introducing people to this new idea of a dog guide. People haven't seen this before. Up to this point, Ann, Helen Keller, they've been guided with a human guide, somebody with them. So Ann announces to people, I'm training, I'm going to come back. Betty's expensive. It costs $400 out of Ann's pocket for Betty, equal to over $7,000 of today's money. So it's a big expense. Ann makes everybody know or lets everybody know that she's doing this. She comes back with Betty. It's interesting because today we see guide dogs. We have one in the room with us. We're familiar at this time. People were not familiar and people were stunned to see a dog guiding Ann. The description of her leaving her house the first day is great. Where people came out, crowded around her. A policeman showed up because he was worried about her. And she, Betty guided her from her apartment on Bradley Street to City Hall. And everybody was amazed and cheering that they got there. And it's this great description of people having their minds expanded. They've never seen this before. And Ann's experiencing independence that she's never had before. It's a big deal. And she knows, I think one of the amazing things about it is that she's aware she's doing this. She is living an example for people to see. She's on an upward trajectory. In the background, there is trouble going on. Got the stock market crashes in 1929, or the fall. This is right after the Lighthouse project is approved. So the economy starts to, Vermont is hit by it. I know the comments always that Vermont was impoverished so they never felt the depression. People are talking about it in the paper within that year. The economy is hitting Rutland in various places. So this becomes harder for her to raise money. VAB in this time is a temporary operating status. They really need the state to come in with some funding. And they believe that if the state doesn't come in with the funding, it's likely that the work will just be dropped. So the VAB is really hoping to satisfy the state. William Dyer is the commissioner of public welfare. He is an old Remontra from Rutland. He's been a long time public servant. He's in state government. He is a guardian of Vermont taxpayers, a tax pay. Vermont taxpayers taxes, I guess, making sure the taxes are going to the right thing. From articles he's written, I know he's suspicious of outsiders with expensive ideas. And he said, you know, these people will come up with an idea and they will target a certain community and they'll use propaganda and they will elicit sympathy and empathy. And then those people in that town will develop programs that want to be paid for them before you know it, or backs up against the wall. He's talking about this in prison reform that he's involved with in the state. When he's the commissioner of public welfare and he's talking with Ann Connolly in this lighthouse project, it's entirely that. These are outside people with big money proposing a big project in Burlington. So, Dyer doesn't come out against it, but I know he's got to be suspicious. Plus, I have a suspicion that Ann Connolly might wrinkle him a bit. She's opinionated, she's outspoken, she believes she is the expert. So, lighthouse is expensive. It's going to cost the state money each year to keep going. Plus, I know from the Perkins archives that there are complaints being raised about Ann by some of the volunteers. Some of them don't like working with her. Don't know exactly why they had complained about her to William Dyer. There's kind of this Dyer's collecting ammo against Ann. Complaints by some of the trained people, some of the blind people in Vermont who Ann trained, who then got training and couldn't find a job because there's no jobs in the state for them. There is no setup. It's either the public are going to buy the things they make. The state's not involved yet in doing any of that. So, they're writing letters back complaining. I got this training and there's nothing for me to do here. And all the money that the state has is going to Ann Connolly. So, they're very gossipy letters. Ann was down in Rutland and I went and said, why can't you come teach? And she wouldn't teach. And I believe she might not even know how to teach anymore. That's a letter written by somebody that she's taught. So, they're undermining her from behind. And then Ann has met these two women, Gladys Stearns and Priscilla Parsons from Johnson. They're both blind and they hit it off. They're good friends. And Ann says, you know, you're both great. You already have this training. She approves them to go to Perkins for extra training because she wants them to be part of her staff at the lighthouse in Burlington. She needs help. She said, I can't do all this myself. So, she's fed them on this idea that they need to go do this. And that all gets back to William Dyer, that Ann has approved them and he says to them, Ann wasn't approved to do that. She had no authority to tell you that. He's in charge. Once this money, because the state has offered, I think a couple thousand or five thousand mentioned, once that money's out there in the states involved, they are much more calling the shots. And William Dyer is really looking at, what is she doing? And all of this is building up, hoping to get a bigger state appropriation in 1930. So, this is all going in the background. This is 1929. May 1930, William Dyer realizes the lighthouse is expensive. He writes to the American Foundation of the Blind, says, will you send an expert up here to give us an assessment on this project? They come up here and they say, the lighthouse isn't feasible in a place like Vermont. A lighthouse works in an urban center. Vermont's rural, it's spread apart. You're going to have to pay for transportation for people coming up to Burlington and back. You should focus on home teaching. The teaching should be individual in the home, not a group center. That works better for an urban place. This is Ann's entire project and it's canceled. She learns about the cancellation of the lighthouse project at the annual meeting. She's raising money for it like two days before. She's not made aware. They're going to meet and make this decision without her. The person from the AFB insists that they bring Ann in and let her know they're changing the plans and she can resign or she can take a lesser position. They're going to hire a cited replacement and she's devastated. Completely done. I know this from a letter that she writes and she says she cannot believe. The AFB expert says Ann Connolly has to be at this meeting. If she's going to lose her job and this project's going to change, she's your field teacher for the state. They bring her in and Ann says they're all ashamed and embarrassed. They don't want to face me. They bring her in and she learns that they're going to make this change and if you know the term geographic determinism, this is it. This is how we end up with the VAB that does home teaching. She demands to know which one of you made a decision to replace me with a cited teacher and they all kind of pointed each other and they point at William Dyer and William Dyer says no she did and he points at the AFB expert and she stands up and by Ann's description she has to defend herself and she said a state like Vermont would benefit with a cited teacher who has to drive all around. They have a limited budget. From the state's perspective, they have a limited budget. Other states have budgets of tens of thousands of dollars. Vermont works with thousands. We have to figure out how to make this money stretch. VAB knows that if the state pulls out, it's entirely privately funded, it's going to be limited, it can't be a statewide service. I'm sure they all look at this like we can't keep Ann Connolly as the state field teacher. She needs an assistant, she's more expensive for them and she's told, Ann writes this, three people from my board came and said don't ask us too much money. We can make more money or we can do better with the state appropriation with a cited teacher and we told the state that. So she's angry, she was thrown under the bus by women in her own group and she writes this to Winifred Holt like can you believe this? And she says, her letter full of all of her bile about this, she writes to her friend Winifred Holt because Winifred's behind this big project so Ann writes all this sad story of what has happened but in the end she says you know I've heard nothing bad about the work I've done but they're telling me I've done nothing in the state. They told me not to teach anymore but they're also telling me they're helping me find a job out of state to teach. And she said you know I pay taxes here this is where I live I'm going to stay and fight the fight. She literally has that and she does so she stays this is a bit about you know the work being now conducted by sighted teachers she stays and she continues to go around the state and tell people hey they're firing me it's crazy so Ann Gladys and Priscilla form this business in Burlington the blind people's quaint shop Ann quickly hooks up with Burlington High School gets a deal with the principal to have students in the school come and read to the blind people in Chittenden County in their homes they sell products out of the shop made by blind people this is great too they form their own agency the Vermont League of Blind Citizens and this is just some emphasis they say the days of handicrafts are over we need to have real jobs for blind people this is now moving into the depression too 1931 blind people for blind people that's very much Ann's position that she learned from the lighthouse so they form this new organization and they then have to say we're also going to work with the state we're cooperating with the VAB and the state program but nobody who joins our group can be part of the VAB so I think that's very funny they exclude them right away you can't be sighted to be part of this group and then they swing into action there's an article 10 days into their formation Ann's out in Waterbury helping a family she also helps a man down in southern Vermont being blinded they developed this annual Christmas party that lasts past all of them I think it goes into the 60's and also this is a quick side story she praises Myrtle Aldrich the Northeast Kingdom as the Helen Keller of Vermont and if you don't know Myrtle Aldrich look her up she's a great story and through all of this Ann is going all over Vermont with Betty and she's famous she's well known they're celebrities kids do fundraisers for them and they have bookmarkers with Ann and Betty on their bookmarkers and the greatest thing about Ann Connolly is she is 100% aware of what she's doing she's living this model of an independent blind person that no one has seen and in her essay that she wrote in 1926 she said when you're in an unorganized area you don't just have the work for the blind to do you have to work on the minds of the sighted because they're seeing something new for the first time they're having their understanding expanded so she's living this role to show what is possible this is great so she's replaced by the sighted person Roberta Townsend from the AFB Roberta picks up where Ann leaves off and her first project this shows up in this magazine they do wayside selling in Proctor this is a school donated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and they build this kind of cooperative workshop for blind men to sell their products out of and the article goes on about how she made it how they put it together this letter over here comes from Ann and her two friends who made that the Vermont League of Blind Citizens I think and they fire off this letter and it says oh you want to know who's responsible for all of this you know this all of the stuff that these guys in here know how to do Ann taught them so as they're going and saying the blind person taught them all of these things then you got rid of the blind person you hired the sighted person and the money from the state's going to the sighted person and the blind guys are left to try to sell what they can oh and by the way we still want to work with them but just to set the record straight so it's a funny letter of them being incredibly scathing but I rightly so they're angry another interesting shift that happens the reports that start coming out from the VAB in the state Roberta Townsend is the sighted replacement she answers to the state she answers to William Dyer and her emphasis is on men men, a man's job in a manly world blind men to take his righted place as a useful contributing member of the community there's such an overt emphasis on working with men that I couldn't not say something I saw and I was like oh I've never seen this any descriptions of Anne and I went back and started looking at how much influence was on Anne to work with women to work with women's groups to prefer to show a preference in working with blind women, she worked with everybody but most of the reports that she gave she's talking about a blind woman, young girl she's helped, she's in women's clubs and there is this stark shift that the emphasis on the work for the blind is for blind men and you really don't hear much about any blind women being helped after that or at least not in this period I'm looking at Anne in the meantime moves to 106 Cherry Street which is somewhere very close to us here opens her own shop Anne Connolly's handy shop handy craft shop sometimes too these are ads she had in the paper picnic lunches, put up tasty combinations delivered she was making these lunches for people downtown and also for students at the Converse School who is looking for a few ambitious women to introduce her products into every home in Vermont Betty her dog dies chokes they think on a bone splinter okay I'm going to wrap it up, Betty dies her second dog is Pellerin 1931, this is the greatest picture of Anne, came from the CNI Inc. Institute Anne is involved in Burlington she has her shop she's involved in bringing in the blind players of Brooklyn who she was part of founding long ago, she brings them in they perform she petitioned City Hall to get exclusive vending rights for blind people to set up at like games and concerts and whatnot 1935 oops I think I missed one piece of that, well Pellerin, her second dog is poisoned yeah and they did an autopsy and they say this is either a malicious act, somebody intentionally poisoned her dog or the dog ate rat poison like meat that had been tainted by arsenic Pellerin dies she Pellerin, her second dog and her third dog are paid for by people in Burlington who feel sorry for her, who see how independent she was, she gets a third dog Mimi she starts another tour of the state with Mimi all of these articles are written about what she's doing and what she is doing is being a living example tours women clubs this is great because I think she understands she's going to be written out of the history so this is an account of her speaking at one of the groups this tour she does at 35 says what has she been doing for the past five years and Connolly has proved what a blind person can really do with a lot of courage and scanty financial resources she started a store in just one block from church street in Burlington her small store was a large school so she connected the idea of selling penny candy and the children soon became eager to go to Miss Connolly's shop she increased the store supplies, the magazines papers, party favors, novelties and even luncheons for the children she's a model she's living what can be done organizes social outings for her friends, she operates her shops to the close of the 30s you see less of her in the paper she's dealing with thieves, these kids are stealing a lot of stuff from her from her shop and she's also sick and her illness worsens each year the people know this that she's sick and she's getting worse and she passes away in 1939 this is some of her obituary Miss Ann Connolly 50 for years of familiar figure on the Burlington streets with her C&I dog she died this is about her will she leaves her will to the VAB so she's kind of our first bequest and she leaves money aside for her dog to care for her dog after she dies so it can go to another blind person and she leaves her typewriter and other goods to other blind people that letter on the side is from a Burlington resident who loved her and wrote about her something I think is very cool is that people knew she was dying two months before she dies the St. Albans paper honors her by writing this remember when article 25 years ago when Ann Connolly opened the first class for the blind in Vermont clearly very bad that she had lost her position and then this is how she gets forgotten she dies in 1939 she in the 50's whenever this was I think this is about the 1950's the newspaper runs in the remember when section 25 years ago this happened they remember she brought first white cane to Vermont came back with her second dog the Lions club of Newark gave her a new souvenir thing called a white cane red tip she's the first one to bring it to Vermont they remember when Betty died they remembered when the quaint shop opened quaint shop opened they remembered when Ann started the first classes in city hall 50 years later they remember that she opened the first school for the blind in St. Albans that's it one last thing this statement is a statement she made about traveling Vermont with a guide dog her article is called I walk with a dog and she said currently in Vermont not every train will let me take my dog with me in my seat I have to check it in with baggage and she said but we must put up with some inconveniences when we were blazing a new trail she was so aware that the state had yet to catch up with where she is and her best ideas are services that we offer today our organization lives and deliver services that she was talking about but they weren't able to fund back in 19 whatever so she amazes me in that she had such a vision for what could be and she struggled just to be an exemplary person to help elevate minds here in the state this is her name in Braille okay, any questions? sorry, you want to go? yes Sarah not so much a question but I couldn't read Catherine McSweeney's letter yes I don't know if it's revealed within the letter but she was not only writing that letter but she was one of the first female physicians trained in UVM oh that's interesting part of the thing is McSweeney fans and physicians I didn't know that but I bet you she helped Anne maybe when she was sick in the end they would put ads in the paper saying Anne Connolly needs things like they're asking the community to help her so it was very known that she was chronically ill you had a question? yeah right there's not a lot of comment about that I know she had an assistant sometimes she was in a car I know they were driven when Mrs. Smith, Anna Smith who brings her here in 1913 when she dies Anne Connolly writes this letter saying she calls Mrs. Smith her pal and the most fun I ever had in the state was when she and I were palling around like figuring this out so I picture them in a car going through the dirt roads later they'll say Anne Connolly traveled from Burlington to wherever just with her dog independently so that must have been mind blowing to people too yes you know one of the things I like about history is not only learning about the past but thinking about how it applies today and I have two questions about today approximately how many blind people are there in Vermont today that's a great question I don't know the exact answer I know that we say there are around 15,000 visually impaired people in the state visually impaired right and that's a good point because Anne when she would do these surveys one of the students she trained who criticized her said these surveys are all inaccurate like we can't count on her because she's counting people in there who aren't completely blind because Anne was looking at low vision which we do now we are Vermont Association of the Blind and visually impaired so there was a lot of they added VI just in the last like 20 years or 30 years or something yes history point of view and partly because there's a reaction to the word blind and more people probably in the state are visually impaired and so to this day there are many people that might not want to approach us 15,000 more or less yes, supposed to double by 2030 and children that are blind are visually impaired I went to visit the Florida school which is a really interesting place I've all been wondered and have done some research but never really kind of bungled through it didn't get the answer but what is a death or blind student today where do they do Vermont have a school like Florida does or how do they get in? No, today we have a children's services program our staff would work depending on when we would hear about a baby maybe maybe they know right away maybe we hear quickly that there's been an infant who has a vision impairment we will start working with the family as soon as we can I think initially it's partly to just reassure the parents that there are experts here who can help you I've heard that from parents we didn't know what to do and so and so showed up and just let us know it's going to be okay as far as specifically what happens there's age appropriate interventions and teaching and it begins we have people working with infants now we have worked with infants all the way helping them all the way through high school and they go to college so I don't know if that answered your question there is no school in the state no the student will go to school and our teachers will work with them in the school I mean there's a lot of history about the benefit of mainlining the school can you talk about that a little bit only I know that there's an effort that mainlining was beneficial and that they were saying that in 1907 the Overbrook school that Ann went to had a kindergarten and they early on started saying students should be in as much as they can a blind student should be in a regular school that idea grows Winterford Holt was very much into that mainstreaming and Ann was too Ann was trying to demonstrate I can be involved in society like everyone else she made that point of doing a year at the normal school so she could be just among sighted students I'm not sure if that answered your question but yeah I'm not sure I think maybe because like I know they get rooming in places at a discount they'll find somebody we can give you this house they had an office for one place on Colchester Avenue because the guy who owned the building had somebody blind in his family and gave him a discount so I think maybe their lease was up and they'll find another place that could give him a deal I'm guessing yeah sure thank you everybody I remember you how are you good to see you thank you you came all the way across the state over here cool