Julia Romana Howe (1844 to 1886) was born in Rome to Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe. On December 30, 1870, she married Michael Anagnos, who she had met on a trip to Athens with her father. Dr. Howe had hired Anagnos to be his secretary and tutor Julia Romana in Greek. Anagnos became the director of Perkins after Howe's death in 1876. Julia Romana was involved in Perkins throughout her life, and supported the day-to-day activities during her husband’s directorship. Read the Romana Howe article on Perkins.org

Francis Joseph Campbell (1832 to 1914) was one of the early students at the Tennessee School for the Blind. In 1858 Campbell was hired at Perkins as an assistant music teacher, was promoted to head teacher shortly after, and served as the director of the department from 1858 until 1869. Throughout his life, Campbell worked as a teacher and advocate of people who are blind. Campbell was also an abolitionist and advocate of human rights throughout his life, sometimes running afoul of public opinion. In years before the Civil War, his music training practice was boycotted after he taught reading to a sighted formerly enslaved person and refused to renounce his anti-slavery views. Read the Campbell article on Perkins.org.

Winthrop Lark "Tad" Chapman (1915 to 1996) was a student in the deafblind program at Perkins and graduated in 1938. The Tadoma method of communication was named for Tad and Oma Simpson, who were the first deafblind students to use it. In the Tadoma method, the deafblind person places their hand on the speaker's jaw and lips, while also feeling the vibration of the vocal cords. After graduation Tad traveled abroad, including to South Africa, where he was part of an effort to establish educational programs for deafblind people in those countries. 

Anna Gardner Fish, who had a 44-year career at Perkins, began as an administrative assistant to Michael Anagnos in 1897 before becoming the registrar. Over the course of her career, she collected many pieces of Perkins theater and concert ephemera, including programs and scripts. She hand-wrote a booklet of pre-1940 Perkins anecdotes and collected information on the history of the Kindergarten. She also wrote extensively for the school, including pieces for The Lantern, memorials, short biographies, and appreciations.

Charles Frederick Fraser (1850 to 1925) attended Perkins from 1866 to 1871 after losing his sight as a child. Following his graduation, Fraser went on to a business career before becoming the first Superintendent of the Halifax School for the Blind 1873. Recognized for his advocacy on behalf of the blind, Fraser became a household name and received many accolades both during and following his time as Superintendent of the School. In 1913, Fraser was publicly thanked by the Legislative Council of Nova Scotia, an honor that had “not been accorded to anyone for over eighty years” and was recommended for the honor of Knighthood in June 1915. Read the article on Frasier on Perkins.org.

Joseph Beal Glover (1818-1902) was a Perkins Trustee and benefactor. When a new building was built on the Kindergarten campus in 1903 his name was put in gilt letters over the main entrance of the building and his portrait hung over the marble fireplace in the parlor in his honor. Glover Cottage on the Watertown campus was named for him.

Julia Ward Howe (1819 to 1910) married Perkins’ founding director Samuel Gridley Howe in 1843. Ward Howe became a renownedmell

writer, lecturer, and social activist, including women’s suffrage and education, and abolitionism. She is also remembered for writing the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a work that has become an enduring part of American culture, continuing to be referenced, reinterpreted, and performed today, including at Perkins every year. Read the Ward Howe article on Perkins.org

Samuel Gridley Howe, (1801 to 1876), was the founding director of the Perkins School for the Blind. He attended Brown University and Harvard Medical School and was a soldier and surgeon in the Greek War of Independence. He is best remembered for his work with Laura Bridgman, a pupil at Perkins who was deafblind and one of the earliest individuals with deafblindness to learn language, and the first American to do so. Howe was a prominent leader in the field of blindness, printing for the blind, and other social justice and educational reform movements in the United States. He was married to Julia Ward Howe, suffragist and author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Read the Samuel Gridley Howe article on Perkins.org

Dr. Jessica L. Langworthy (1864 to 1938) became the assistant of Dr. Edward E. Allen in his Harvard course on the Education of the Blind in 1925. In February of 1926 she developed a course in "special methods" of teaching the blind, supplementing the Harvard course and supplying the practice to match its theory and background. Langworthy served as Harvard Class Tutorial Guide and Head of the Special Methods course from 1925 to 1936. She is also credited with helping Dr. Allen get his Harvard course started. Langworthy received a Doctor of Education from Harvard in 1928. Read the Langworthy article on Perkins.org.

Alexander Mell (1850 to 1931) was the director of the Imperial Royal Institute for the Education of the Blind in Vienna from 1886 to 1919. During his tenure, Mell is credited with shifting the commonly held belief in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that people who are blind need to be cared for in homes and with social welfare, to acknowledge that they can live independently and as part of society. In 1896 he was put in charge of building a new Institute for the Education of the Blind, which held a braille printing shop and a library. Other lasting contributions would include Mell’s work and writings on the pedagogy of education for students who were blind, providing a teacher training course at the school, and saving and making available resources documenting the history of blindness. Inspired by this collection Perkins started the Blindiana Library with Mell's help. Read the Mell article on Perkins.org

Anne Emilie Poulsson (1853 to 1939), known as Emilie Poulsson, is remembered as an American children’s author who championed early childhood education and the kindergarten movement. Poulsson’s “finger plays,” were wildly popular when they were first introduced in 1893 and are still popular today. Poulsson had vision loss as a young woman, which led her to Perkins for rehabilitation. While there she learned braille, taught, and attended Miss Garland and Miss Weston’s Kindergarten Normal Training Class in Boston. Poulsson would go on to be an integral part of helping Perkins Director Michael Anagnos develop the first Kindergarten for blind students in the United States. Read the Poulsson article on Perkins.org.

Dennis Alvin Reardon (about 1847 to 1916) was sent to the Perkins Institution in 1855 when he was eight years old, an orphan, and homeless. He had partial vision in one eye that slowly improved and by the time he graduated from Perkins he left Boston to work in the U.S. Coast Survey in planning and charting. Reardon returned to Boston “down at the heel“ and went to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe for a job. He started as a general laborer doing kitchen work and driving a donkey cart. Shortly after arriving in Boston, Reardon’s sight failed and he became totally blind. After a period of despondency Reardon started working in the printing office as “help,” and within five years he became the manager. Reardon carried many jobs, dabbling not only in mechanical engineering, but in physics, all things electrical, and extensively in architecture, building renovation and planning. He served as treasurer for the Perkins’ Alumni Association, and was a trusted friend to the students. Read the Reardon article on Perkins.org.

Laura Elizabeth (Howe) Richards (1850 to 1943) was the daughter of Perkins founding director Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe. She was named after Laura Bridgman, a Perkins pupil who is considered to be the first person who is deafblind to be formally educated. In 1871 she married Henry Richards with whom she had seven children. Richards was a prolific author whose titles included works related to her parents and Perkins, such as Letter and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe in two volumes, Two Noble Lives: Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe, Laura Bridgman: The Story of an Opened Door, and Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, which won her and her sisters, Maud Howe Elliott and Florence Hall a Pulitzer Prize in 1917. 

Benjamin F. Smith (circa 1913 to 2008) worked at Perkins almost his entire career before becoming director in 1961. He was a teacher at Perkins for 38 years and later became the first visually impaired man to hold the director’s office position (1971 to 1977). He served as a teacher in both Lower and Upper Schools, as Dean, Principal, Assistant Director, and finally Director. Smith helped develop a career training program and a community residence plan (the first of its kind). Under Smith’s administration a number of important program changes were pioneered in order to meet the needs of a changing pupil population and to comply with the new special education legislation in place. The school began serving a large number of multi-impaired students and clients while maintaining its academic program for high school students. In the 1940s Smith did a great deal of original work on teaching arithmetic on the braille writer, and these innovations affected the design of the Perkins Brailler. Read the Smith article on Perkins.org.

Joel West Smith (1837 to 1924), a Perkins piano tuning teacher who was blind, created an alternative to embossed alphabets, called Modified or American braille, in 1878. At the time, it was a more efficient system that was faster to read and write than other forms of embossed type. It was popular in the United States and competed with the original braille system for many years.