When she first saw the page, Allison Seyler stopped. "It was a jarring moment," she said, one that forced her to pause and think about what she was looking at.
It was an 1850 census record, with ornate handwritten script. And it listed Johns Hopkins, the university and hospital's founder, as the owner of four enslaved men.
"I sort of stopped, and took a second," said Seyler, program manager of Hopkins Retrospective, a project begun in 2013 that has already researched difficult questions about the institution's past. She was shocked by what she was seeing. "This is antithetical to the story I've been told about Johns Hopkins."
The university had long upheld a story of its wealthy 19th-century benefactor and namesake as a Quaker abolitionist. Now Hopkins is casting a more rigorous, critical eye on its own beginnings.
It began when Seyler was auditing a seminar at Johns Hopkins taught by a mentor of hers, the retired Maryland state archivist Ed Papenfuse.
Papenfuse, who is investigating how Hopkins made his fortune, told Seyler he thought he had found evidence that Hopkins had enslaved people in 1850, she said.
"My curiosity was obviously piqued," Seyler said. Her instincts led her to the census.
And there it was: In a list of enslavers, she saw the name Johns Hopkins, and the ages of four men.
She thought: "This is a really critical record -- this is a thing I'm not sure has been brought to light."
Seyler said she immediately wondered what other records they could find -- and how to share the information with the public.
The president's office brought in history professor Martha Jones to lead the effort to learn more. A first step was to figure out whether this Hopkins was the same man who had bequeathed the $7 million gift establishing the university.
All the record really tells people is that whoever answered the door in 1850 told the census-taker that four men were enslaved there, Seyler said.
The documents that remain, Jones wrote in a report about their initial findings, "are shard-like in quality," just traces of Hopkins, his life and the people around him.
Researchers are at the beginning of what is expected to be a long effort, Jones wrote, including attempts to learn about the lives of the enslaved people in the Hopkins household, their lives after their liberation, and his views on abolition.
Papenfuse praised Jones' "extraordinary, pioneering" scholarship, but also expressed some doubt about what they know for certain. "My personal opinion, based on the records I've seen so far, is the evidence is simply not sufficient to make an argument that he was a slave owner," he said. The lack of records and the complexity of the institution of slavery, he said, means "you need to be very careful about how you interpret what people are doing and how they are doing it."
In the 1860 census, there are no enslaved people listed with Hopkins' name.
In 1873 when Hopkins died, he had three people working for him whose ages aligned with three of the enslaved people listed in 1850, Papenfuse said. And in his will, for "those African Americans who had worked for him and worked with him for a very long period of time he provided exceptional bequests," he said -- a house and the equivalent of nearly $100,000 for a coachman, and the equivalent of nearly $60,000 to a housekeeper.
Papenfuse said they must continue the research, and he thinks it is important that they look at assessment records in Baltimore to see how Hopkins was taxed, because enslaved people would have been part of that equation.
"Our job is to start piecing these shards of information together," Seyler said.