As the founding matron of the school that became Gallaudet University, she played an important role in deaf history, even playing a key role in lobbying US congressmen in the effort to establish Gallaudet (then the "National Deaf-Mute College").

She was appointed to be the first matron of the Columbia Institution on May 30, 1857, and held the position for nine years, until August 1, 1866.

[1] She died on May 13, 1877, in Washington, District of Columbia[1] and was interred in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut.

Sophia Fowler Gallaudet, named as the "Mother of the American Deaf," was honored and memorialized in Angeline Fuller Fischer's The Silent Worker, in 1915, to remind young deaf people of her influences that has pervaded Gallaudet College for so many years, and of her contributions to its early growth as an institution of higher education.

[2] A bronze memorial tablet, sculpted by Eugene Hannan, was unveiled Guilford, Connecticut in 1917.