secretary. The Bala House constantly grew for many years due to Emma's energetic fundraising activities. The two began their own method of teaching in an all-day and night program. Emma established the belief that children were much more likely to master speech if they were exposed and trained in it from a very early age. The Bala House became a state institute in 1885. Emma and her students traveled to Chicago to demonstrate her methods of teaching language to the deaf at the World's Colombian Exposition, where Emma began to slowly lose control of her life. Death and legacy Garrett died on July 18, 1893, in Chicago, Illinois. Her death was considered a suicide related to a mental breakdown at the World's Columbian Exposition. Garrett established the Pennsylvania Home for the Training in Speech of Deaf Children Before They Are of School Age, which is to this day known as the Bala House, which became a state institute in 1885. Educational views Garrett, along with her sister Mary, believed that deaf students should be taught with an oral language method. In 1890 Emma Garrett visited seven different countries to view and critique their deaf schools and institutes. When she returned to Pennsylvania to establish her own school she brought back and mixed together many of the views methods incorporated in other countries. The children who entered the school were either born deaf or lost their hearing before acquiring speech, which left Garrett a difficult task of teaching them language. Garrett established the school to be in constant communication and contact with the children from the time they woke up until the time they went to sleep, much like a current boarding school, but just for deaf students. Garrett saw the ideal world for a deaf child as 'never having to see another deaf child', leading to her creation and establishment of the Pennsylvania Oral School for the Deaf. Emma's first work in teaching school-age deaf children to talk was her own single-element method which, to her, seemed unnatural, so after just one year she gave up that technique and went out to search for the best way possible to fully teach these students. Garrett constantly studied other parts of the world's deaf schools and saw Italy's method of the syllabic method to work well, so she switched to teaching the syllabic method. In a few short years, she had created