Johns Hopkins was born in 1795 on his family’s tobacco plantation in southern Maryland. When he was 12 years old, his parents, observant Quakers, freed their slaves and put Johns and his brother to work in their fields, thus ending his formal education. By the time he was 24, he had established his own mercantile house, and later he invested in the Baltimore and Ohio, the nation’s first major railroad. In 1867, Mr. Hopkins arranged for the incorporation of Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital. When he died in 1873, at age 78, he left $7 million to the two institutions, the largest philanthropic bequest in . history at the time. Founded in Baltimore in.
