JHU Press’s 2017 book Evergreen: The Garrett Family, Collectors and Connoisseurs contains a short reference to a man named John W. M. Lee (1848-1896), who was hired in the 1880s by Evergreen’s owner, T. Harrison Garrett (1849-1888), to assist with his growing collection of books and prints. Lee was Garrett’s private secretary and, after Garrett’s […]
This week’s Evergreen Obscurus focuses on the Noyes Alumnae House at Notre Dame University of Maryland, located just north of JHU’s Evergreen Museum & Library. When I started as the Philip Franklin Wagley Director & Curator of Evergreen last March, I found myself confused when I heard docents telling museum guests about “Little Evergreen,” or […]
Like many throughout the country, staffers of the Sheridan Libraries and University Museums are turning to books and other media in an effort to better understand the ways in which white supremacy and anti-Blackness have shaped American life—and the ways in which these destructive forces can be dismantled and counteracted. As we head into the […]
The protests and unrest sparked by the tragic death of George Floyd have caused me, like many Baltimore citizens and members of the Hopkins community, to reflect on the Uprising in April 2015 inspired by the death of Freddie Gray. It’s a moment that is seared into the memory of every Baltimorean who lived in […]
For today’s post, I would like to shed some light on Charlotte Doremus Pierson Garrett Bellairs (1872-1939) who was briefly married to Horatio Garrett, one of the three Garrett sons who grew up at Evergreen in the 1870s and 1880s.A fair amount is known about Horatio Garrett, middle child of Alice Whitridge Garrett (1851-1920) and […]
Greetings from Evergreen Museum & Library’s virtual office in my basement. For those of you new to us, the museum is housed in a 162-year-old Italianate mansion in the northern-most part of Baltimore City, about 2 miles from JHU’s Homewood campus. Evergreen was home to two generations of Baltimore’s Garrett family and is celebrated for […]
It began with a visit, on a calm December day, to a spacious, sunlit farmhouse on the edge of Leakin Park. There I encountered for the first time John Clark Mayden’s Baltimore “street portraits”—photographs set worlds away from that peaceful location … or so you might think. I was there with Dr. Lawrence Jackson, Bloomberg […]
Earlier this fall, the Friends of the Johns Hopkins University Libraries took a bus trip to Washington, D.C. to visit the exhibition Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote at the Library of Congress. The exhibition, which opened this past June and runs through September 2020, tells the story of the largest reform […]
The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries are pleased to announce the Peabody Ballroom Experience, a new collaboration with Baltimore’s ballroom community, a performance-based art culture comprising gay, lesbian, trans, and gender non-conforming people of color. The project will host public workshops with special collections materials, film screenings, panel discussions, and dance workshops; conduct oral history […]
We take for granted that library books should not be written in, altered, and tracked with barcodes (if we let them out of the library at all). But before the invention of modern security measures, or even of circulating libraries themselves, book owners went to great lengths to protect their libraries from coming to […]