Born on February 15, 1836, in Weston, Massachusetts, Sarah Fuller grew up in nearby Newton Lower Falls. After graduating from the Allan English and Classical School in West Newton she became a schoolteacher. From 1855 to 1869 she taught in Newton and then in Boston. In 1869 she studied for three months under Harriet B. Rogers at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, in order to prepare for her new post of principal of the Boston School for Deaf-Mutes, which opened with ten pupils in November of that year. It was the first such institution in the country to be operated on a day-school basis, and in the first five years of her principalship the enrollment increased sixfold. In 1870 she learned of Alexander Melville Bell╒s system of ╥Visible Speech╙ for teaching the deaf, and it was at her invitation that his son, Alexander Graham Bell, came to the United States the next year to teach the system to the school╒s faculty.
Fuller was an early and powerful advocate of teaching deaf children to speak rather than to sign, and she also believed in beginning such instruction at an early age. In both stands she went against the prevailing opinion of her organized colleagues. Her An Illustrated Primer, 1888, was aimed at teachers. In that year Mr. and Mrs. Francis Brooks, parents of a deaf daughter, endowed the Sarah Fuller Home for Little Children Who Cannot Hear to promote her methods among children of nursery school age. (The home lasted until 1925; the endowment later became the Sarah Fuller Foundation for Little Deaf Children of the Boston Children╒s Medical Center.) In 1890, with Alexander Graham Bell, Caroline A. Yale, and others, she helped found the progressive American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, of which she was a director from 1896. In the same year, 1890, she had briefly for a pupil the ten-year-old Helen Keller. In 1910 she retired as principal of her school, which had been known since 1877 as the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. She died in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, on August 1, 1927.
