In the fall of 1889, CAROLINE DONOVAN, a prominent Baltimore philanthropist, was counseled by Mayor Ferdinand Latrobe to endow a professorship at Hopkins. This was the first endowed chair and a key contribution in a groundbreaking year for philanthropy at the university: the beginning of an endowment beyond the funds left by the university’s founder, Johns Hopkins. Mrs. Donovan’s commitment, along with two other major gifts that year, prompted Hopkins President Daniel Coit Gilman to pronounce that “The era of great gifts has begun!”