Laurent Clerc

Biography

Laurent Clerc was born in 1785 near Lyons, France, and, despite his own deafness, devoted himself to teaching. In 1816 he sailed to America with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, helping to found what became the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, and serving as its first teacher and principal.

Clerc spent more than forty years guiding generations of deaf students, introducing a rich manual language and a culture of mutual encouragement, and he now rests at Spring Grove Cemetery among those who remember him as the apostle of American deaf education.