John Ciekot Remarks

Remarks made by John Ciekot, Program Director at Civic Works, at the 152th Anniversary of Johns Hopkins' Death, Green Mount Cemetery, December 24, 2025

Friends,

Highest and best thoughts are often held in silent respect. Respectful thoughts are in order today as we commemorate the passing of Mr. Johns Hopkins on this calendar day one hundred fifty-two years ago. Setting aside silence, we share our reflections on this man we never met. Mr. Hopkins has passed away and yet, amazingly, is still with us.

My comment is not historical research. Rather, I wish to honor him by trying to understand him in his time and especially in his place. So, I look at his Clifton home. It may be possible, partially, for a person to acquaint with Mr. Hopkins because he sees how Mr. Hopkins built his home with stout stucco-clad masonry walls; how large windows lighted welcoming rooms; how the interior ceilings and walls were so artfully decorated; how those rooms led to arcaded porches open to the world of carefully shaped landscapes; and, how those rooms could also lead you into a tower that overlooked all of Baltimore. Through all this, I have come to know a little of Mr. Hopkins.

At Clifton, Johns Hopkins created a place that exhibited selected perfections of visual experience. These created delight within the visitor.  Visual delight began from the moment a visitor’s coach passed through the gatehouse doors. On a graveled drive, you meandered through gently shifting topographies of lawn, shrubs, statues, and trees.  This place told you of orderliness yet evoked your curiosity with each change of perspective as you moved across the landscape.  You found a slow-paced, quiet grace attached to the place.

Then, your coach approached the mansion’s tower that seemed plucked from a painting of the Italian Renaissance and behold, by the engineered magic of an arch, you drove directly under the tower’s great mass.  

Then, with excited anticipation, you stepped through heavy dark walnut doors and were greeted by a giant mural of the Bay of Naples illuminated by colored sunlight streaming through enameled glass. Here, and in all the public rooms, you found color, artist’s tricks for the eye, and many unspoken invitations for your imagination to take flight.

Clifton was Mr. Hopkins’ island of bliss – invented more for others, I think, than for himself. Clifton meant rest and peace, but Mr. Hopkins did not permit himself to be far from buying, selling, investing, and managing.  It was business that enabled him to build a Clifton and much else. 

When quite young, Mr. Hopkins saw that money was deeply connected to the good and the bad.  He learned the mechanisms of business in the booming port city of Baltimore and was determined to use them to make a fortune in a hurry.  Perhaps he sought a fortune in a hurry because he saw deadly illnesses sweep through town every cold winter and every hot summer. 

With everyone else, he felt mortal jeopardy when, at age nineteen, Baltimore was rattled with a day and night of falling bombs and flying rockets delivered by the British war fleet anchored in our harbor. 

He suffered the passing of brothers and sisters.  He suffered the sudden loss of his dear brother and business partner, Mahlon, who died at age 35.  At every turn in this world of tumult, pain, and loss, he seems to have steeled himself to move forward steadily and find opportunities to profit. 

And I have to think that Mr. Hopkins was aware that morality was at stake at every turn along his way. In Baltimore, he saw all manner of kindness, goodness, and fellowship, and also all manner of hurt and cruelty.  He saw and reflected on it all as his Quaker tradition practiced him to do. 

He was aware that the national and Baltimore economy was deeply connected to many lives in enslavement.  Slavery had centuries of longevity and legality. In that first half of the nineteenth century, America-wide business expanded through investment, production, and credit tied to bonded laboring families and the dollar value placed on each one of them. 

Meanwhile, something else was going on and ripening.  The established way of business was running headlong into an awakening and broadening American moral sense that was demanding slavery’s end. 

Nothing was static; rather, all was in motion. Mr. Hopkins was aware that business and other things change.  Baltimore was in the thick of it all - a hotbed of commerce and a hotbed of competing and conflicting ideas.  Ideas came from everywhere - business peers, public speeches, the pulpits, newspapers, personal letters, books. 

I don’t know exactly what Mr. Hopkins read.  Some say his house was full of books lying about.  Thomas Paine, de Tocqueville, Emerson, the bible, the classics from ancient times – all were available to him.

Mr. Charles Dickens visited Baltimore and other cities in 1842 and published his “American Notes” the same year.  Dickens liked much of what he saw, such as institutions of charitable care.  And much he hated, especially commercial avarice and enslavement.  In 1844, Baltimoreans read “A Christmas Carol” with its life lessons of charity and a plea to ease the pain of others.

In 1852, when Mr. Hopkins completed his Clifton island of beauty, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” hit the streets - a runaway best seller and it was quickly banned in many states. Differing ideas of what America was for were shouted about. For whom were American life, liberty, and happiness intended?  Could financial security for one’s family be maintained if the enormous value of slave labor was subtracted out from the economy? 

That question was transformed into heated politics, and with an election eight years later, passions exploded into the war years of killing and burning, leaving hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans and millions left at loose ends.

This pain too, Mr. Hopkins saw and reflected upon. He had taken sides in the conflict. He hoped for a new American business wherein slavery had no role whatsoever.  What could he do? Resources, he had aplenty, but what’s to be done?

He landed on actions that were totally outside self-serving business deals. He landed on goodness. He would use his money in the last to make a head-on assault against two negative conditions of life that produce suffering: sickness and ignorance. Mr. Hopkins evidently had faith that good and impactful things could be done with a judicious use of money. 

He set to expand people’s opportunities for life and happiness by careful preparations done in quiet, good order.  Just two years after the war, Mr. Hopkins had a university incorporated, trustees for the university and hospital secured, and ample real estate where each could be developed. 

The hospital would be in eastern Baltimore, where the laboring population was in need. The university would be in the beautiful rolling landscapes of Clifton. 

Mr. Hopkins may have asked himself if institutions for health and enlightenment could be crafted like a fine house could be crafted. He seems to have known that living institutions are different. They are imagined structures that are launched with thoughtful people at the helm and fueled by their endowments.

Many years of exercising and evolving those structures would be required before answering the question, “Could such institutions become wellsprings of health and wisdom and stimulate hearts to promote goodness upon the land?” Our own generation may make a partial answer.

But as for Mr. Hopkins, I believe that in the last, he heard and heeded Jacob Marley’s cry from the grave, “Mankind was my business.”

Copyright (c) John Ciekot 2025