ENTRY

The Shared Signing Community of Lantz Mills

SUMMARY

Lantz Mills in Shenandoah County was home to a unique shared signing community in which deaf and hearing residents communicated with one another in a localized sign language. Beginning in the 1760s, Lantz Mills was home to a number of deaf residents, starting with the daughters of Petter Haller and Ann Dorothea Halrin Haller, who emigrated from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. By the time of the 1880 U.S. Census, there were at least fifty-two deaf residents within a five-mile radius of Lantz Mills. Over time, Lantz Mills developed into a community where a majority of members, both hearing and deaf, communicated in a visual language, creating what is known as a shared signing community. Unlike the better-documented shared signing community of Martha’s Vineyard, the Lantz Mills community was largely undocumented until recently. The Lantz Mills shared signing community exemplifies a unique space where community members utilized a visual language.

Lantz Mills

Lantz Mills is a community near the town of Edinburg in Shenandoah County. It was founded in 1747 by a German immigrant named Hans George Lantz. The presence of deaf residents in the community dates to the 1760s, when the Haller (Hollar) family came from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, after receiving a land grant from Lord Fairfax for property on Stoney Creek in what was then Frederick County. The family of Petter Haller, who was born in Alsace, France, in 1715, and Ann Dorothea Halrin Haller, who was born about 1729 in an unknown location, included two deaf children: Barbara, who was born about 1750, and Catherine, who was born in 1755.

Petter Haller left his property on Stoney Creek, which included a sawmill and a grist mill, to his son Petter Haller II (1748–1813), who in turn left a portion of the land to his son Peter Hollar (1783–1855), who was deaf. Hollar married Magdalene Dake (b. 1790), who, like Haller, was deaf. They had three children, including one deaf daughter, Barbara Annie Hollar (1829–1902), who married William Nester (1825–1901), who was also deaf and had attended the Virginia School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, as the Virginia School for Deaf and Blind was then known, in Staunton.

Under pressure from debts, in 1815 the Hollar family sold the land that included the grist mill that would give Lantz Mill its name to Samuel Morrison Stuart, who then sold the mill to George Adam Lantz in 1824.

The Shared Signing Community at Lantz Mills

Many families in Lantz Mills consisted of a mix of hearing and deaf members. Many of these families were connected to other deaf communities, including those in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Highland County, Ohio. Deaf Lantz Mills residents had a mixture of both hereditary deafness, as in the case of the Hollar family, and illness-caused deafness. There were at least fifty-two deaf residents living within a five-mile radius of Lantz Mills identified in the 1880 U.S. Census.

Due to the number of deaf residents, Lantz Mills developed into a unique community where a majority of members, both hearing and deaf, communicated in a visual language, creating what is known as a shared signing community. While there are a handful of deaf communities like Austin, Texas, and Rochester, New York, that employ signed languages as a primary means of communication among deaf residents, most hearing residents of these communities do not know or use signed languages. The best-documented historical shared signing community in the United States is the town of Chilmark in Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, as chronicled by Nora Groce in her book Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard (1985). As with Lantz Mills, deaf and hearing residents in this community communicated in a commonly understood local signed language, in this case what became known as Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language.

As in Martha’s Vineyard, residents of Lantz Mills were fluent in locally used signed languages. These included a now-endangered regional sign language, Lantz Mills Sign Language; versions of American two-handed manual alphabets that evolved from British Sign Language, a two-handed manual alphabet that depicts the shapes of written English characters that was imported to the colonies in the late eighteenth century; and early iterations of American Sign Language, a one-handed manual alphabet that eventually became the primary, standardized sign language used in the United States.

A Deaf-owned Business: Christian & Sons 

According to oral interviews and signed narratives, deaf citizens of the Lantz Mills area were deeply involved in the life and economy of the community. The cabinetmakers Christian & Sons was one such business that was essential to the local economy. According to the Shenandoah Herald, local deaf entrepreneur William Christian founded Christian & Sons in 1877, one of the first known deaf-owned and run businesses in nineteenth-century Virginia. He married Isabella Hollar, who was deaf, in 1863. After her death, he married Henrietta Creath, who was also deaf and whom he had met at the Virginia School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, in 1902.

After William Christian’s death in 1915, the business was run by his sons and eventually his grandson, who made custom cedar chests for the community until he passed away at age eighty. All in all, three generations of the deaf-owned Christian family businesses served Lantz Mill and the surrounding Edinburg commercial area for nearly eighty years. However, with the death of longtime residents and the development of new economic opportunities in the late twentieth century that lured other residents away, the Lantz Mills community declined, taking with it some of the last memories of the shared sign language that was created and sustained in the area.

MAP
TIMELINE
1749

Lantz Mill is founded by German immigrant Hans George Lantz.

1766

Petter Haller moves to Lantz Mill with two deaf daughters, Barbara and Catherine, after receiving a land grant from Lord Fairfax. Barbara and Catherine become the first deaf residents of Lantz Mill.

1812

The United States’ first known formal deaf educational program, which featured written English and an imported British Sign Language as its teaching method, began on the Bolling Hall property in Goochland.

1815

The Holler (Hollar) family sells the grist mill to Samuel Stuart, who sells it to George Lantz in 1824. The mill becomes the center of a fast-growing unincorporated town named Lantz Mills.

1839

The Virginia Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind (now the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind), the state’s fifth program and permanent school for the education of the deaf, opens at Staunton.

1877

William Christian founds a cabinetmaking and coffin-making business in Lantz Mills, becoming a successful deaf business owner.

1880

The U.S. Census identifies at least fifty-two deaf residents living within a five-mile radius of Lantz Mills.

1915

William Christian dies and his sons carry on running the John Jacob Christian & Sons furniture business, followed by Horace Christian at the same address.

1970s

Due to deaths, family relocations, and declining economic opportunities, the Lantz Mills shared signing community fades away.

CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
L. Brockway, Kathleen & Stringham, Doug. The Shared Signing Community of Lantz Mills. (2023, April 26). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/the-shared-signing-community-of-lantz-mills.
MLA Citation:
L. Brockway, Kathleen, and Doug Stringham. "The Shared Signing Community of Lantz Mills" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (26 Apr. 2023). Web. 28 Nov. 2023
Last updated: 2023, September 08
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