Johns Hopkins
Encyclopedia : J : JO : JOH : Johns Hopkins
- This article is about the person. For the university, see Johns Hopkins University. For the hospital, see Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Johns Hopkins (May 19, 1795 – December 24, 1873) was a Baltimore businessman, a Quaker, an abolitionist, and a philanthropist. He left substantial bequests in his will to found the university, teaching hospital, a training school for female nurses, now the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, and the Johns Hopkins Colored Children Orphan Asylum. These institutions were all posthumously founded, the colored children orphan asylum in 1875, the university in 1876, the hospital and nursing school in 1889 and the medical school in 1893. The Johns Hopkins Colored Children Orphan Asylum was to be administered under the hospital's half of the $7,000,000 Johns Hopkins provided to found the Johns Hopkins Institutions, according to his will, two codicils to this will, the incorporation papers filed in 1867, and the instruction letter he prepared months before his death in 1873 to give guidance to the hospital trustees he selected. The president of university board of trustees which he also selected was a member of the hospital board of trustees. This orphan asylum was thereby also called the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Children Orphan Asylum. The school of nursing was to be similarly administered according to the same sources.
Johns Hopkins was born in Crofton in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the second of eleven children, on a 500 acre (2 km2) tobacco plantation. When his Quaker parents freed their slaves in 1807, Johns and his brother were put to work in the fields, interrupting their formal education. Johns worked for a time in his uncle's wholesale grocery business, where he fell in love with his cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth's parents would not allow them to marry, since prejudice against first cousins marrying was strong among Quakers. They agreed never to marry.
Hopkins and Jonathan Moore, also a Quaker, went into business together. The business later became Hopkins & Brothers after Moore dissolved the partnership claiming that Johns loved money too much. 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 out the railroad in 1857 and 1873.As a Union man during the Civil War, he was in part responsible for the use of the railroad to support the Union cause. He provided supplies and funds to support the Union cause as well in a city with strong Southern sympathies.When Hopkins died without heirs in 1873, he left $7 million (mostly in B&O stock), the single largest philanthropic donation ever made to educational institutions up until that time. This bequest was used to found the Johns Hopkins Colored Children Orphan Asylum in 1875, the world-famous Johns Hopkins University in 1876, the Johns Hopkins Press in 1878, now the longest continuously operating academic press in America, the renown Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland, both founded in 1889, and the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1893. Johns Hopkins' views on each of these institutions except the press 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. The original site for Johns Hopkins University was chosen by Hopkins himself 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" 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 an training school for black female domestic workers, an "orthopedic convalescent" home and school for "colored crippled" children and as an orphanage before it was closed in 1924. It was never reopened. The school of nursing was closed in 1973 and reopened in 1983.
Overall,Johns Hopkins was much nuch more than the wealthy philanthropist who endowed the world famous institutions that are his namesakes as he is usually represented. He was an abolitionist who was a child participant in his parents' emancipation of the family's able-bodied slaves in 1807, who worked with other abolitionists like Myrtilla Miner and Henry Ward Beecher before the Civil War, who supported Lincoln and the Union during the war, and who was after the war a Reconstruction actor who provided instructions in the abovementioned documents that his philanthropy should be used in ways that were often opposed to the racial practices that were beginning to emerge during the Reconstruction period. The departure point for representing him in this way is the first and only biography on him, Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette published in 1929 by his relative, Mrs. Helen Hopkins Thom.
Hopkins's first name, often misstated as "John", comes from the surname of one of his ancestors. His great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, married Gerard Hopkins, one of their children was named Johns Hopkins, and that name was passed on to his grandson.
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