The Gross Family at Homewood
Holly Nelson discovers how the lives of Black laborers bridge the past and present
In our last post, I suggested how the stark lines we sometimes draw between the past and the present fall blur in the face of careful historical research. Today I am very pleased to feature the work of Fall 2021 Hard Histories Lab member Holly Nelson, whose research demonstrates how an investigation into the past of the Homewood campus — as told through the lives of Julia and Benjamin Gross — bridges its 19th century origins as a slaveholding estate and its 20th century reinvention as a university campus.
Holly’s work began with a close look at one of JHU’s present-day historical placques, one that stands at the corner of N. Charles and Art Museum Drive titled “Gatehouse.” Visitors are told that the small stone structure situated just off the street is a vestige of what was once William Wyman’s 19th century Italianate villa. The plaque admiringly reports on Wyman’s love of nature, his vision for the grounds, and the construction of his home. Wyman’s estate, along with adjacent properties, was gifted to the university in 1902.
Holly aimed to research the rest of the story and discovered that Wyman’s villa remained standing on the campus for more than a half-century after his 1903 death — until 1955. For the first half-century of the Homewood campus, students, faculty, and staff shared the grounds with not one but two prominent monuments to Homewood’s one-time slaveholding owners: Wyman’s villa (razed in 1955) and Charles Carroll’s Federal-period Palladian house, today’s Homewood Museum.
Not only did Wyman’s villa survive him. His reliance on Black labor at Homewood also outlived Wyman. Holly’s research outlines the lives of two such workers, Julia and Benjamin Gross, who labored at the Homewood villa likely into the 1950s, sharing the campus with JHU students, faculty and staff.
Read more about Holly Nelson’s research here, from her poster presentation, and here, at her timeline which carefully outlines the lives and labors of Julia and Benjamin Gross. Holly’s work reveals more precisely what JHU memorialized when it named buildings — such as the Wyman Park Building — or marked streets — such as Wyman Park Drive — for the family that once called Homewood home.
Holly recommends that our campus memorials be expanded to include Julia and Benjamin Gross, and Black laborers like them, who worked on a campus that had yet to confront its inheritances of slavery and anti-Black racism. If today’s JHU Gatehouse still retains the “stunning” quality that it exhibited in William Wyman’s time, it is only in the sense that we have stunningly failed to consider establishing a “Gross Way,” or the “Gross Building” at Homewood as tributes to those who labored here.
Thanks to Holly Nelson for her work with the Lab. And congratulations to her for being recently admitted to the BA/MA Program in History at Johns Hopkins University. Her thesis will chronicle the history of the Dance Theater of Harlem. Holly is Woodrow Wilson Research Fellowship; President of the JHU Modern Dance Company; and member of the John Astin Theatre, the English Club, the JHU Ballet Company and Hopkins Votes. She also is a founding member of the Inter-Dance Council. Holly aspires to earn a JD/PhD (and those who know me know how thrilling a prospect that is!)
MSJ.