What did Helen's visit to Niagara …

This remarkable woman who was totally blind and deaf visited Niagara Falls in March of 1893.She was accompanied by her live-in teacher Anne Sullivan and Alexander Graham Bell (yes, the famous inventor) who had become a good friend of Helen’s. Before inventing the telephone he was a teacher of the deaf. He was with Helen to visit a school for the deaf in Rochester, New York.

They stayed at a hotel in Niagara Falls, N.Y. near the Niagara River and the falls. Dr. Bell had given her a down pillow that she could hold against herself and a window of the hotel and feel the rush of the water.

In a letter to her mother several weeks later she described Niagara this way, “I wish I could describe the cataract as it is, its beauty and awful (remember when this word meant this?) grandeur and the fearful and irresistible plunge of its waters over the brow of the precipice. One feels helpless and overwhelmed by the presence of such a vast force”.

She may not have been physically able to see or hear Niagara but.....she was most definitely able to experience the power of Niagara.