📍Ivy Green, 300 North Commons Street West, Tuscumbia, AL 35674, USA
1880 – 1888“I was born at Ivy Green in June 1880, in a white clapboard house my grandfather built in Tuscumbia, in the far north of Alabama, its walls and fences covered in English ivy. At nineteen months an illness left me blind and deaf, and for years I was a wild, frustrated child, cut off from everyone around me. In March 1887 a young teacher named Anne Sullivan came to live with us in the little two-room cottage beside the main house, and the battle between us began. On the morning of 5 April 1887, at the water pump in the small pump-house behind the kitchen garden, she held my right hand under the running water and spelled w-a-t-e-r into my left. Suddenly I understood that everything had a name, and I spent the rest of the day learning as many as I could. Teacher and I were together for nearly fifty years. I left Alabama at eight to study, went on to graduate from Radcliffe College, and spent my life campaigning for people with disabilities, but I always called Ivy Green home. That same pump still stands in the garden.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today