Johns Hopkins
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This article is about the person. For the university that bears his name, see Johns Hopkins University.
Johns Hopkins (born May 19, 1795, died December 24, 1873) was a wealthy entrepreneur of nineteenth century Baltimore, most noted for his philanthropic creation of Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Johns, whose nickname was "Johnsie", [1] was the second of eleven children in his Quaker family, whose 500-acre (two km²) tobacco plantation was located in Crofton in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. His unusual first name, often misstated as "John," was the surname of his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns. His given name was "Johns Hopkins" -- after one of her children, who was his grandfather. [2]
When his parents, Maryland-born Samuel Hopkins and Virginia-born Hannah Janney, freed their slaves in 1807, Johns and his brother were put to work in the fields, interrupting their formal education. He also helped to care for the younger children in the family. [3].
After he left the plantation, Hopkins worked for a time in his uncle's wholesale grocery business, where he fell in love with his cousin, Elizabeth Hopkins. Because of prejudice against first cousins marrying being strong among Quakers, Elizabeth's parents would not allow them to marry. [4] They pledged never to marry anyone else and remained as companions for his lifetime. He provided a home for her and left it to her in his will, where she lived until her death in 1889.
Hopkins and Benjamin Moore, also a Quaker, went into business together. The business later became Hopkins & Brothers after Moore dissolved the partnership claiming that Johns loved money more than he did.[5] One writer though calls this statement a "myth" or "fact" which "was so widely reported that the comment calling Hopkins "the only man more interested in making money than I" is variously attributed to his former business partner, a close associate, and even the international financier, George Peabody. [6] After Moore withdrew, Hopkins then partnered with his three brothers; Hopkins & Brothers sold various wares in the Shenandoah Valley from wagons in exchange for corn whiskey, which was then sold in Baltimore as "Hopkins' Best". Later, Hopkins invested heavily in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, where he made most of his fortune. He twice put up his own money to bail the railroad out of debt, in 1857 and 1873. As a Union man during the American Civil War, he was responsible partially for the use of the railroad to support the Union cause, despite Maryland's general sympathies to the Confederacy. [7] One of the first campaigns of the Civil War was planned at his summer estate, Clifton. He also helped to bail the city of Baltimore out of debt more than once and provided assistance, sometimes unsolicited, that helped youths needing help to start a career or business.
He died without heirs in 1873 and left $7 million, mostly in Baltimore & Ohio Railroad stock, to establish his namesake institutions. This sum was the single largest philanthropic donation ever made to educational institutions up until that time. The bequest was used to found the Johns Hopkins Colored Children Orphan Asylum in 1875, the Johns Hopkins University in 1876, the Johns Hopkins Press in 1878 (the longest continuously operating academic press in America), the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in 1889, and the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1893.
The views of Johns Hopkins on the institutions he named, can be found in the incorporation papers, filed in 1867, his instruction letter to the hospital trustees dated March 12, 1873, his will, and its codicils.[8] The original site for Johns Hopkins University was chosen personally by Hopkins, to be located at his summer estate, Clifton. This property, which is now owned by the city of Baltimore, is the site of a golf course and a park named "Clifton Park."
Before it was closed in 1924, the orphan asylum, which was described as a place where "nothing was wanting that could benefit science and humanity" at its opening, later served as a training school for black female domestic workers, an "orthopedic convalescent" home and school for "colored crippled" children, and as an orphanage. It never was reopened. The school of nursing was closed in 1973, but reopened in 1983. [9]
Overall, Johns Hopkins was an abolitionist, who was a child participant when his parents emancipated the able-bodied slaves of the family in 1807, who worked with other abolitionists such as Myrtilla Miner and Henry Ward Beecher before the Civil War, who supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union during the war, and who, after the war, was a Reconstruction actor who provided instructions in the above mentioned documents that his philanthropy should be used in ways -- that were often opposed to the racial practices that were beginning to emerge during the American Reconstruction period as well as in the posthumously constructed and founded institutions that would carry his name.
[edit] References
Mr. Johns Hopkins, Kathryn A. Jacob, The Johns Hopkins Magazine, January 1974, volume 25, number 1, pp. 13-17, The Johns Hopkins University - this is the most definitive brief biography of Johns Hopkins, from the archives of the Johns Hopkins University Library
