Johns Hopkins was an American merchant, investor, and philanthropist. Born on a plantation, he left his home to start a career at the age of 17, and settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where he remained for most of his life.
The New York City draft riots, sometimes referred to as the Manhattan draft riots and known at the time as Draft Week, were violent disturbances in Lower Manhattan, widely regarded as the culmination of white working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil and most racially charged urban disturbance in American history. According to Toby Joyce, the riot represented a "civil war" within the city's Irish community, in that "mostly Irish American rioters confronted police, [while] soldiers, and pro-war politicians ... were also to a considerable extent from the local Irish immigrant community."
Riverdale is a residential neighborhood in the northwestern portion of the New York City borough of the Bronx. Riverdale, which had a population of 47,850 as of the 2000 United States Census, contains the city's northernmost point at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. Riverdale's boundaries are disputed, but it is commonly agreed to be bordered by Yonkers to the north, Van Cortlandt Park and Broadway to the east, the Kingsbridge neighborhood to the southeast, either the Harlem River or the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Riverdale Avenue is the primary north–south thoroughfare through Riverdale.
James McCune Smith was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.
Abigail Hopper Gibbons, née Abigail Hopper was an American abolitionist, schoolteacher, and social welfare activist. She assisted in founding and led several nationally known societies for social reform during and following the Civil War.
The Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul of New York, most often known as the Sisters of Charity of New York, is a religious congregation of sisters in the Catholic Church whose primary missions are education and nursing and who are dedicated in particular to the service of the poor. The motherhouse is located at Mt. St. Vincent in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. They were founded by Elizabeth Ann Seton in 1809.
Maggie Flynn is a 1968 musical with a book by Morton DaCosta and music and lyrics by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss.
An orphan school is a secular or religious institution dedicated to the education of children whose families cannot afford to have them educated. In countries with universal public education systems, orphan schools are no longer common.
The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating from about 200,000 children. The co-founders of the Orphan Train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but this was not always true. They were mostly the children of new immigrants and the children of the poor and destitute families living in these cities. Criticisms of the program include ineffective screening of caretakers, insufficient follow-ups on placements, and that many children were used as strictly slave farm labor.
The Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York (HOA) was a Jewish orphanage in New York City. It was founded in 1860 by the Hebrew Benevolent Society. It closed in 1941, after pedagogical research concluded that children thrive better in foster care or small group homes, rather than in large institutions. The successor organization is the JCCA, formerly called the Jewish Child Care Association.
John Decker was an American businessman, politician and firefighter. He served as the last Chief Engineer of the old New York City Fire Department, the original colonial-era volunteer firefighters of New York City, from 1860 until 1865. He led the fire department during the New York Draft Riots, for which he gained national attention, and later founded the Volunteer Fireman's Association.
Porter-Leath, formerly known as the Children's Bureau, is a non-profit organization based in Memphis, Tennessee that serves children and families in the area. Porter-Leath was founded in 1850 as an orphanage and has since grown to six program service areas. The agency retains the early nature of its mission by providing foster care and has also expanded to early childhood education.
Friends' Asylum for Colored Orphans was an African American orphanage at 112 West Charity Street in Richmond, Virginia. It began as a program to provide care and education to African American children and later evolved into a foster care center, an unwed mothers and pre-adoption boarding home and a community day care facility. It is currently operating as a family services organization.
Lucy Goode Brooks was an American slave who was instrumental in the founding of the Friends' Asylum for Colored Orphans in Richmond, Virginia.
Graham Windham is a private nonprofit in New York City that provides services to children and families. It was founded in 1806 by several prominent women, most notably Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. Since 2015, the organization has received greater awareness due to the success of the Broadway musical Hamilton, in which the character of Eliza describes the orphanage as her proudest achievement.
The Howard Colored Orphan Asylum was one of the few orphanages to be led by and for African Americans. It was located on Troy Avenue and Dean Street in Weeksville, a historically black settlement in what is now Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York City. The asylum gradually deteriorated due to lack of funding, and closed in 1918 after an incident involving burst water pipes, which resulted in two students contracting frostbite and having their feet amputated.
Rising Ground is a large human services organization in New York City, with approximately 1,600 employees supporting more than 25,000 children, adults, and family members annually. Founded in 1831 as the Leake and Watts Orphan House, Rising Ground focused on providing child welfare services for much of its existence. Currently, Rising Ground services include child welfare, juvenile justice services, services for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities, special education school programs, services for survivors of gender-based violence, early childhood services, and services for unaccompanied minor children, among others. The organization has approximately 50 programs located at about three dozen sites in New York City and Westchester County, New York. In April 2018, the organization changed its name from Leake and Watts to Rising Ground.
The National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children, later known as the Merriweather Home for Children, was a relief association in the Pleasant Plains neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
