Black Futures and the Hopkins Obstacle
“Maintenance and Education” at the Orphan Asylum
It will be your duty, hereafter, to provide for the erection, upon other ground, of suitable buildings for the reception, maintenance and education of colored orphan children.1 — Mr. Johns Hopkins to the Johns Hopkins Hospital Trustees, 1873
In the Hard Histories Spring 2023 Lab, my research grappled with the meaning of the statement by Mr. Johns Hopkins in the epigraph above. In the early twentieth century, did the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum (JHH COA) have a different understanding of the meaning of “maintenance and education” than I did as a student and historian in 2023? To understand the girls’ experiences within this Orphan Asylum, my goal was to examine the day-to-day standards of the JHH COA in its time and to understand how the asylum’s staff interpreted the language of Mr. Hopkins’ charge.
To surface information about the lives of girls residing in the JHH COA from 1909-1914, I reviewed receipts and related materials held at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives. The surviving records pertain mostly to financial matters, and the expense receipts serve as one of our only viewpoints into day-to-day life at this Orphan Asylum. From these materials I produced an ArcGIS map of notable locations in the lives of the girls resident at the JHH COA, superimposed on a map of Baltimore, viewable here. Click on the map points to discover additional information.
I learned that girls living in the JHH COA were physically well cared for. Receipts show, for example, that the orphanage purchased fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables for them.2 The JHH COA provided for the girls’ medical needs, including providing funds for prescription glasses from a private optician for some girls.3 Girls also traveled to professional offices to receive medical care like that of dentist Dr. W. F. von Schricker.4 These dental visit records were particularly amazing and useful because bills from Dr. von Schricker included the names of 25 girls residing in the JHH COA—and recovering the girls’ names was a special concern of our Lab this past semester. I plotted this, among other important sites, on my ArcGIS map of the JHH COA in context.
Occasionally, the JHH COA staff’s definition of care extended past life into death. When girls died while in the asylum’s care, the institution financed funeral arrangements and burial plots. These same records also evidence a kind of neglect. Neither the records of the JHH COA nor of the funeral professionals note the place of girls’ family members in these tragic rituals. Studies of other orphan asylums and our own research reveals that many children resident in orphan asylums had surviving relatives (including parents and siblings).5
One example has stayed with me especially strongly. In 1911, a girl named Theresa Cornish resident in the JHH COA received treatment for an unspecified illness at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. There, she was pronounced “uncurable” and transferred to the Bay View Asylum, where she passed away.6 Theresa was buried in a lot purchased by the JHH COA at Laurel Cemetery, a prominent and long-standing Black burial site in Baltimore.
Neither the records of Theresa’s illness nor of her burial make mention of her family. But elsewhere in the JHH COA materials are clues to who her family may have been. Girls with the same family name, Cornish, resided alongside Theresa at the Orphan Asylum: Anita and Leila. In 1900, Anita aged 3 and Leila aged 1 resided in the Baltimore home of their parents, James and Mary. By 1910, the census notes that Anita, Leila and also 6 year old Theresa and 7 year old Loretta were resident in the JHH COA.7
Were the four Cornish girls sisters, all the children of James and Mary? Their names and ages suggest they may have been. And what of their parents? In 1920, Leila, having left the asylum, was again living with her mother Mary in Baltimore, telling us that Mary was still alive while her daughters resided at the asylum.8 At the time of her death, Theresa was likely someone’s child and also perhaps a sister. Still, the surviving JHH COA records do not permit us to tell her full story.
Education is a powerful lens through which to view the limited expectations for girls in the JHH COA. After 1895, at its Remington site, the asylum sat just across from the present-day Wyman Park Drive as Johns Hopkins University’s Gilman Hall was being constructed in 1913-1915. Consider the contrast. The young white men attending JHU were expected to become professionals who would lead secure and prosperous lives. The same was not expected for girls resident in the Orphan Asylum. They were being trained to serve in white households.9
At the asylum, the girls had some access to learning, though I was not reassured by the modest efforts to educate the girls given the overwhelming evidence that they were trained to provide domestic service. Records indicate that, for instance, the JHH COA staff acquired history books, among them Heroes of History which included stories of mostly medieval European figures.10 Nothing suggests that they were, as we might wonder, taught African-American history. By 1912, the girls residing in the JHH COA were sent to a segregated public school, a place that Orphan Asylum leadership reported was in a notable state of disarray, preventing the girls from receiving a quality education.11
When it came to the girls’ futures, expectations were limited. No one who oversaw the Orphan Asylum, neither the staff, the Lady Managers, nor the Trustees, did anything to encourage the girls to pursue higher education. While our research into the girls’ futures continues, thus far there is no evidence that any of them went on to attend the Maryland Colored State Normal and Industrial School (today’s Bowie State University), for example, which trained Black women and men to be teachers during some of the same years as the JHH COA was in operation.12
In anticipation of the closing of the JHH COA in 1914, girls resident there were transferred to various institutions throughout the American South, including the Manassas Industrial School in Virginia.13 There, in 1913, Kelly Miller (remembered as the first African American student to briefly enroll at Johns Hopkins University) spoke at the school’s commencement.14 Miller was by then a leading social scientist, professor, and dean at Howard University who outspokenly advocated that African Americans—like the girls at the Orphan Asylum—advance themselves through education.15 Miller’s view was not one adopted by the JHH COA. As an upcoming Substack post by my classmate Kamal Kaur suggests, many of the girls missed the chances Miller saw for them, and spent their adult lives not as teachers but in household service.
Matt Palmer, KSAS BA ‘23
Emma Katherine Bilski, Editor
Johns Hopkins, Letter of Johns Hopkins to the Trustees of “The Johns Hopkins Hospital” (Baltimore: WM. K. Boyle & Son, 1873), 5.
“Produce Purchase List Gardiner--Griffith, Collection,” Folder 2.1.5.1908, Box 504410, folder 2.1.5.1908, Records of the Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD.
“Charles A. Euker Prescription Optician, January 31, 1911,” Folder 2.1.5.1910, Records of the Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD,
“Von Schricker Dental Expense Stafford--Willinger, May 1, 1912,” Folder 2.1.5.1912, Box 504411, Records of the Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD,
For example, see Jessie B. Ramey, Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
“Funeral Expense Euker--Fuller, August 11, 1911,” Folder 2.1.5.1910, Records of the Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD,
U.S Census Bureau, “Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910—Population: Baltimore City,” Ancestry Library.com, table 16, accessed May 5, 2023.
U.S. Census Bureau, Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920-population; Baltimore City.
“P-----------’ Revel: Little Orphans Taught to be Useful at Colored Asylum They Elect their own Officers Children Sew, Mend, and Wash and Spend their Afternoons on the Swings and Cellar Doors,” Pro-Quest, The Sun, August 23, 1908.
“Items from Hochschild, Kohn & Co., November 1912,” Folder 2.1.15.1912, Box 504411, Records of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD.
Public School Correspondence, Series 1, Folder 1.4, Records of the Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD. The letter is unsigned, so it is unclear who wrote it, whether the matrons or other staff, Lady Managers, or Hospital Trustees.
“New Building Dedicated: Commencement Exercises in New State Normal and Industrial School at Bowie,” Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), June 17, 1911.
“Manassas Payment Confirmation, February 20, 1917,” Folder, 2.1.5.1917, Box 504412, folder 2.1.5.1917, Records of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD.
“Briefs from the Virginias,” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 1, 1913.
Angela McMillian, “Dr. Kelly Miller: A Resource Guide.” Library of Congress, August 27, 2019.