The West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and Blind began their first academic session on September 29, 1870, with an enrollment of thirty students: twenty-five were deaf and five blind. After the school's first academic year, Board of Regents secretary Robert White wrote in his report to Governor Stevenson: "Professor Johnson, in the instruction of the blind, has displayed a marked ability which is showing, and will show, good results in the department." Johnson represented the new school in 1871 at the inaugural convention of the American Association for Instructors of the Blind, and in 1876 he provided large maps used to teach his blind students as part of West Virginia's exhibit at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The exposition was the first world's fair hosted in the United States, and the first since West Virginia became a state in 1863.