Boylan School in Jacksonville, FL was founded as a girls' home training school by Hattie E. Emerson, a Methodist Episcopal Church, North missionary and cousin of the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Boylan is the maiden name of benefactor Ann Boylan DeGroot, treasurer of the Newark Conference, Women's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, North. She gave $1,000 (a sizable sum then) to the fledgling home in hopes to atone for, and change the image of, her family, which had operated two large plantations. 

Boylan School created a nurse training department, which evolved into Brewster Hospital to serve African Americans at a time when other hospitals served only whites. The hospital operated for 35 years, through the school's 1932 name change to Boylan-Haven, closing in 1966.