One of the Whipple Website’s longtime supporters recently sent a link to a fascinating article that appeared on May 5, 2021, in The Day, a newspaper published in New London, Connecticut. Entitled “Writing on Water: What Alexander Graham Bell knew about the Mystic Oral School,” it tells of what was originally called the Whipple Home School for the Deaf in Mystic, Connecticut.

It mentions:

• Jonathan Whipple, “a stonemason by profession … [and] a self-educated teacher at the Quakertown School in Ledyard,” Connecticut
• Enoch Whipple, his youngest son, born deaf in 1825
• Zerah Whipple, Jonathan’s grandson who invented the phonetic “Natural Alphabet”
• Clara McGuigan, M.D., the first woman to graduate from the Philadelphia School of Medicine. (She was also the author of a major Whipple genealogy entitled The Antecedents and Descendants of Noah Whipple of the Rogerene Community at Quakertown, Connecticut, published in 1972.)