Ivy Green

Ivy Green

Colbert County, Alabama; Tuscumbia, Alabama; Ivy Green; Helen Keller; Social History; Education; Communications; National Register of Historic Places; Historic American Buildings Survey

A one-and-a-half-story "Southern Viriginian" frame cottage located at 300 West North Commons in Tuscumbia, Ivy Green is significant for being the birthplace and childhood home of Helen Keller. It was during her infancy at Ivy Green that illness rendered Keller's blind and deaf; and it was there, in 1887, that Anne Sullivan taught the seven-year-old Keller to read, write, and speak, using a "finger language" devised by Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston's Perkins School for the Blind.

The Ivy Green complex consists of the main house and two additional structures of historical significance: another, smaller frame cottage built as an office for the Keller family plantation; and the still smaller structure housing the water well and pump which facilitated Keller's famous "communication breakthrough." The property was acquired by the City of Tuscumbia in 1954, and has been open to the public as a museum ever since.

Brian Corrigan, University of North Alabama

National Register of Historic Places, Ivy Green, Tuscumbia, Colbert County, Alabama, National Register #70000101.

Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS AL-317, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/al0093 (accessed November 7, 2015).

Alabama Cultural Resource Survey

November 7, 2015

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