Mary Smith Garrett

Mary Smith Garrett (1839 to 1925) was an American deaf educator. She taught at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Mount Airy, Pennsylvania, and in 1885 she opened her own private school to teach deaf children how to communicate effectively. After the death of her sister, Emma Garrett, she became an advocate of teaching deaf children to speak and to understand speech through visual observation of vocalization techniques. Her career therefore ran from teaching in an established institution to running a private school of her own, with speech and speech reading as her cause.