Benjamin Oliver Bird, the Delaware Conference Academy’s founding principal, was born in Loudoun County, Va., in the early-to-mid 1850s.
He was the youngest son of James A. and Annie E. Bird; his father died when he was one1.
His mother remarried, and the family moved to Gettysburg, Pa., where young Benjamin labored on a farm by day and studied at night. Bird did not attend school until 1865.1
He was 14 when he learned the alphabet attending school during the winter months when farms were idle, “standing … in a class of white children six and eight years old.”2 By his early 20s, Bird was teaching in Rockingham County, Va., where his future wife also was an educator.
Determined to better his circumstances, Bird enrolled in Baltimore’s Centenary Biblical Institute in 1877, where he converted to the Methodist Episcopal denomination. He graduated from the institute’s “normal course” the following year and joined the faculty, where he “exhibited rare tact and skill as an instructor.”
He married Portia E. Lovett of Berryville, Va. on Sept. 29, 1880.
Six years later, Bird was “elected Principal of Delaware Conference Academy in Princess Anne, Md.,” where the couple launched a prep-school branch of Centenary, soon to be renamed Morgan College. Morgan’s archives show Bird was paid the princely annual salary of $600 in 1886, or roughly the equivalent of $10,710 on the school’s 125th anniversary.3
When the Birds arrived in Somerset County with their growing family in the summer of 1886, there was little reason for optimism the new venture would succeed.
Money was limited and accommodations bleak, not to mention attitudes in a community uncomfortable Blacks were pursuing an education. Bird never wavered in preparing the academy for its intended purpose. He cleared the land and oversaw renovations of a rundown Colonial-era mansion to accommodate his wife, their four children and most of his students.
Bird’s biographical sketch in a church publication said “remarkable success has attended his effort to build up an educational center on the Eastern Shore.”1
“In one year,” his obituary noted, “a dining room was built over which was a dormitory for the boys.”2
That structure was followed by two more to house students, and “in five years from the opening, a class was graduated.”2
Bird served as an instructor and mentor, and was a friend to many who passed through its doors.
“The gracefulness of high utility and the majesty of intrinsic power blended his labor,” his obituary read. “Nothing was done for display.”2
Before his death, 53 students “had gone forth as graduate-teachers, bearing the impress of Principal Bird’s hand.”
Bird died just after dawn on April 26, 1897 of Bright’s disease — a kidney affliction, according to a dispatch published in the Baltimore Sun the following day.4 The article noted 95 students were enrolled at the academy.
He was survived by his wife of 17 years and their nine children*, many of whom also attended the academy.
Among those who spoke at his funeral were the pastor of Princess Anne’s Manokin Presbyterian Church and Morgan College’s president.
The 1898 Delaware Annual Conference’s meeting minutes, where Bird’s passing was recorded in a tribute likely written by Jacob C. Dunn, described him as “an exalted type of Christian gentleman, refined, polite, a good companion, beloved in every circle.”
“His gentleness and kindness were manifest in all he did. He was one of the most unselfish of men, and his life was remarkable for scarcely anything more than for his self-sacrificing devotion to duty.”2
Bird was buried on campus under a favorite oak tree.
* – One of the Birds’ daughters, Crystal Dreda Bird, was a historic figure in her own right. At age four, Crystal went to live with a relative in Boston after her widowed mother died in 1899. She studied at Columbia University and in 1938 became the nation’s first Black woman to serve in a state legislature when Philadelphia voters elected her to Pennsylvania’s General Assembly. Her sister, Portia, was a published poet of some renown and was married to Allen Mercer Daniel, a Howard University law professor, law librarian and first Black member of the American Association of Law Libraries.
Conflicting accounts surround Benjamin O. Bird’s birth year: Aug. 14, 1855 is more widely accepted, which would have made him 41 at the time of his death. A 20th century headstone on his grave in the campus cemetery is inscribed “Aug. 11, 1853.”
1 – Representative Methodists (to the) 20th Delegated General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1888, pg. 151.
2 – Delaware Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (minutes) 35th session, March 1898, pgs. 54-55.
3 – Congressional Record – House; Jan. 18, 1968, pg. 175.
4 – The Baltimore Sun; Aug. 27, 1897, pg. 7.
