Helen Rolfe Hopkins Thom was born on November 23, 1869, in Baltimore, Maryland. She was the first child of Joseph Scofield Hopkins and Annette Hicks Hopkins. Joseph, Johns Hopkins' nephew and son of Joseph J. Hopkins, was a merchant who later worked for Hopkins Hospital. She was educated first at Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and then, after a short stint at Goucher College, graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. BA degree in hand, Helen returned to Baltimore and lived with her parents on a sprawling 200-acre estate in Green Spring Valley. 

Helen was raised a Quaker, but after marrying Hunt Reynolds Mayo Thom in 1900, she became an Episcopalian. Hunt and Nellie, as she was called, eventually moved to Roland Park and lived charmed lives as Baltimore socialites. He was a skilled yachtsman who operated his own large aviary. She was an impeccable hostess who apparently liked to drink martinis and smoke an occasional cigar.[1]

For the purposes of this blog post, I am most interested in Helen Hopkins Thom's authorship of Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette. In the foreword to the book, Thom says that "I have always had a latent desire to record the personal characteristics of my great-uncle, Johns Hopkins, and to tell the main events in his life."

We now know that many of the anecdotes and stories that Thom told in the book, especially in the first chapter, were far from accurate. For example:

There was no mass slave release in 1807 (nor in 1812 as is sometimes reported). Thus Thom's claim that Samuel Hopkins was terribly distraught over the decision to manumit his enslaved laborers in 1807 is either a total fabrication or it (1) describes a manumission event that took place in the 1790s, (2) describes the experience of Johns the Elder in 1778, or (3) describes Joseph J. Hopkins' disposition in 1832 when he manumitted Minty and Louisa Wells. 

Speaking of Aunt Minty, she could not have served as a nanny for Johns Hopkins. She was too young. Born in 1789, Minty would have been six years old when Johns Hopkins was born in 1795. Later, after Johns Hopkins left White Hall and moved to Baltimore, Minty (and her daughter Louisa) cared for Johns Hopkins' younger siblings and it seems that she had a special fondness for Johns' younger brother Philip.

Finally, the carefree picture Thom painted of life at White Hall during Johns Hopkins’ youth is totally inconsistent with what we know about the circumstances of Quaker planter families at the turn of the nineteenth century in the rural upper South, even prosperous ones. Quakers were not pretentious or leisurely people. They were industrious, sober, frugal, humble, and above all pious. The Hopkins children would not have lived the kind of pampered, antebellum plantation existence that we see depicted in books like Gone With the Wind. Quite the contrary! Successful tobacco farming required taxing, year-round work. Everyone had to pitch in, especially the eldest male children who would need to learn how to cultivate crops, prepare them for market, care for livestock, and operate and repair farm equipment. The Hopkins family was comfortable, and they owned considerable land, but they were not fabulously wealthy like other plantation families in Anne Arundel county and nearby Annapolis. (See also my post about Isaac Queen.)

It would be interesting to know why and how Thom got her stories about Samuel Hopkins and Johns Hopkins so, well, wrong. Were the stories told to her as she reported them? Or did she play free and loose with the facts for some specific reason, perhaps to conceal her own grandfather's record of slaveholding? Probably a bit of both.

It is certainly not hard to understand how the family stories could have become garbled. First, the Hopkins family of Maryland is enormous, and many members share a short list of common first names (Joseph, Gerard, Philip, Samuel, Elizabeth, etc.), making it easy to confuse one member of the family for another. Second, Thom's father, Joseph S. Hopkins (1840-1926), barely knew his own father, who died when he was just five years old and almost a decade after Minty and Louisa were released. Thom would have had to rely on memories of tales told by her older uncles and aunts, three generations and more than a hundred years removed from the events of eighteen-aught-seven. She may have heard tales about the younger siblings of Johns Hopkins and their "Mammy Minty" and assumed that those experiences were shared by Johns. It is relevant to note that Thom dedicates A Silhouette to her father “Joseph S. Hopkins, whose personal reminiscences of his uncle have made this book possible.” Joseph S. Hopkins died in 1926, three years before A Silhouette was published. 

Thom was not the first Hopkins family descendent to claim that Samuel Hopkins freed slaves. Miles White, the stepson of Johns' sister Margaret Hopkins, wrote in 1900 that "when the Society of Friends decided that its members must set free their Negroes, or be disowned, Samuel Hopkins walked the floor all night before he decided to obey the decision, for he had a large family, and his only means of support was his plantation, the principle crop of which was tobacco, which required negro labor for its cultivation."[3] White cited a manuscript written by a niece of Johns Hopkins named Sarah.[4] White does not say in which year this event occurred. Thom's 1929 version of the story (page 7), that she alleged occurred in 1807, was only slightly different from White's account: "Samuel Hopkins paced the floor for three nights trying to adjust his mind to the changes that would come if he obeyed this ultimatum." We can be fairly certain that Helen Hopkins Thom consulted the White article and/or Sarah's manuscript, and that this may be why she attributed the manumission event to Samuel Hopkins rather than to Johns the Elder. We now know that both Thom and White were wrong.

It's also not difficult to understand why Thom chose to describe the White Hall plantation as she did. When she wrote her book in the 1920s it was common and acceptable to romanticize antebellum life and to portray slaveholders as benevolent caretakers of their bondspeople, complete with what we now recognize as problematic caricatures of obedient field hands and dutiful "Mammies" like Minty. Thom had not read Gone With the Wind, which was published in 1936, before she wrote A Silhouette, but the narrative frames are essentially the same. 

By inventing, or at least perpetuating, the "Myth of 1807" Thom was able to establish an origin story for Johns Hopkins, the hero philanthropist of the family - a sort of Hopkins family version of George Washington’s cherry tree. Unfortunately, the myth doesn't match the facts. One also has to question the other major myth presented by Thom in A Silhouette - that Johns' inability to marry his first cousin Elizabeth explains his decision to remain a lifelong bachelor.

Helen Rolfe Hopkins Thom died on December 19, 1948. She was buried in Baltimore's most famous and historic cemetery, Greenmount Cemetery, next to her husband Hunt Thom and near her beloved uncle Johns Hopkins, whose reputation she played such an important role in shaping.

(I write more about the "Myth of 1807" here.)

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[1] "Hunt and Nellie: Windows on Old Baltimore Society," The Sun Magazine, March 19, 1978.

[2] Helen Hopkins Thom, Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, JHU Press, 1929.

[3] Miles White, "Some Colonial Ancestors of Johns Hopkins," Southern History Association, vol. IV, no. 6, November 1900.

[4] Sarah Hopkins (1812-1856) was the daughter of Philip Hopkins (1760-1814), the brother of Samuel Hopkins.