Joseph Mount

    Joseph Mount was born in 1827 in New Jersey. According to his own words, he became deaf a few months after birth, and entered the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf (Philadelphia) in 1837 at the age of ten. He left the school in 1842. He spent 6 years at the school with one year of absence. His name sign was bending fore and middle fingers and press to palm hand...like a sign for kneel. This does not explain how he obtained such a mastery of the English language as to contribute articles in very good prose style to The Christian Advocate, Scott's Dollar Weekly, and other periodicals between 1846 and 1949.

    He wrote under the pen name of "Joe, a Jersey Mute," and he broke New York's monopoly of deaf literary talent. His remarks on the subject of deafness were more sentimental than learned, but he sounded a new note. The poets Nack, Burnet, and Carlin bemoaned deafness as a calamity, and eluded to themselves as "silent exiles on the face of earth" Said Joe in that connection: "I glory in my eternal silence. I cannot bring myself to believe that any mute feels as if he were 'a prisoner in his dreary cell doomed for life.' My tongue, though mute, does not need the power of speech because my arms and hands can express my ideas. Dumbness-and I say it in earnest-is a lovely silence. There is much in the rude gestures of a mute to charm and to delight another. As long as life lasts, in all probability I shall continue to be deaf and dumb...but I have none of the feelings of a sorrow-stricken lunatic. I claim the honor of being called a Merry Mute; nay, I insist on being designated thus."

    From extent writings we learn that he was probably the son of a harness-maker and certainly the nephew of a Baptist clergyman; that his mother wished him to learn harness and saddle making but he spurned it as beneath his dignity; that he chose the "printing business" instead, and at the age of 18 was working in the office of the Herald at Mount Holly, NJ. that his love of books kept him out of taverns and dives; that he was converted to religious thinking at the funeral of his uncle; and that in 1848 he was appointed a teacher at the Pennsylvania Institution.

    As a teacher he was energetic and popular. He advised children in his care to read the pious works of Hannah More, to drink nothing but cold water, and to "adhere to the truth at all hazards." He continued to be known as Joe the Jersey Mute," and under that name wrote A Leaf from a Teacher's Diary, an amusing sketch in which romance goes hand-in-hand with pedagogy. It is also recorded that he lent his pen to a more serious and valuable subject: the need of a national college for the deaf. He receives honorable mention as one of the four illustrious deaf men who furthered the movement to establish Gallaudet College: Carlin, Booth, Flournoy, and Mount.

    Joseph Mount left the Pennsylvania Institution in 1863, and commenced a new career as a western mute. He was Principal of the Kansas School at Baldwin City from February 1865, to April 1867, when he moved on to Arkansas. He is sometimes called the founder of the Arkansas School at Little Rock, but history is not clear on that point. Others also played key roles in developing standard educational settings for the deaf. As early as 1850 a class of five deaf pupils was taught in Clarksville, Arkansas by J. W. Woodward, a deaf man of rare ability and intelligence. He was a native of Virginia, educated in France, and a journalist in little Rock. Woodward tried for years to obtain sufficient state aid to keep the school going but had to close it in the end. In 1860 another private school for the deaf was organized at Ft. Smith, Ark., in the home of Asa Clark, who had a deaf daughter. The six pupils were taught by Matthew Clark, a deaf-mute educated at the New York Institution. The school received a State appropriation, but the next year it closed on account of chaotic political conditions resulting from the Civil War.

    These early efforts probably smoothed the way for Joseph Mount, who opened a private school in Little Rock on July l0, 1867, and the next year converted it into a state institution. He received an appointment as Principal. His pupils, who had been supported by charity and had been moved from one boarding house to another five times during the year, were finally established on state property.

    But rest had not come to Joseph Mount- with one hundred dollars a month and board assured him as Principal, he resigned suddenly in February 1869, and left the school without a head. When next heard of in 1871, he was in Lee's Summit, Missouri publishing a newspaper, The Prairie Banner.

    Later, he relocated to Dallas, Texas, and remained there a number of years as editor of The Sunny Clime, "a paper owned and published by two deaf women." The paper was still viable into the 1890s.

    The date of Joseph Mount's death cannot be confirmed. The Volta Bureau Library has a scrapbook collection of his Recollections of a Deaf and Dumb Teacher and other pieces published in The Ladies' Repository from 1857 to 1860. He also contributed to W. M. Chamberlain's National Deaf-Mute Gazette and Gallaudet Guide. Many articles signed "Deaf-mute Typo" and Manual Alphabet," were attributed to mount based on local allusions and by his peculiar, moralizing style. To his religious mania he added in later an obsession for teaching the manual alphabet to every hearing persons he met, and would avoid conversation with any one unwilling to learn this convenient method of speech. His chief claim to distinction is having secured appropriations for the Kansas and Arkansas Schools to make them permanent institutions.

Contributing: Reginald L. Boyd

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