Daniel Coit Gilman was inaugurated as the first president of a brand new Johns Hopkins University on February 22, 1876, and the university’s sesquicentennial celebrations of its founding are under way across its 11 divisions with hundreds of events leading up to a Commemoration Day Celebration in February 2026.
And while the Peabody Institute didn’t become a constituent part of the Johns Hopkins University until 1985, Peabody’s history intertwines with Hopkins from the very beginning. Gilman was inaugurated in the Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall, what was simply called the “concert hall” at the time, and Danish composer Asger Hamerik, Peabody’s first director, conducted the Peabody orchestra for the inauguration.
The orchestra numbered about 60 musicians at the time, according to a February 21, 1876, Baltimore Sun story announcing the invitation-only event. It was attended by Cornell President Andrew Dickson White, Harvard President Charles William Eliot, the presidents of St. John’s, Swarthmore, and Haverford colleges, four professors from Yale, “persons of local prominence in education,” and then Maryland Governor John Lee Carroll.
Gilman’s inauguration wasn’t a one-off: public guest speakers and lectures by Hopkins faculty often took place at Peabody prior to the university building its own campus—in fact, early Hopkins faculty member and historian Herbert Baxter Adams, founder of the American Historical Association, held a number of his seminal graduate student seminars in Peabody classrooms. Initially lacking a library of its own, Hopkins was reliant on the George Peabody Library collection until 1916, and many early Hopkins faculty—poet Sidney Lanier, Gilman himself—worked among its stately stacks.
The George Peabody Library officially became part of the Sheridan Libraries, at the time known as the Johns Hopkins Library system, in 1982. Then Assistant Library Director of Special Collections Ann Gwyn noted in a January 1983 issue of the Wilson Library Bulletin, “It seems most appropriate and only fair that the responsibility for establishing this essentially nineteenth-century library as a productive center of research in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries should fall to Johns Hopkins, the university that the Peabody helped to nurture in its early days.”