The University of Maryland Eastern Shore has been known by a series of names reflective of its location, evolving role and mission since enrolling its first students on Sept. 13, 1886.
It opened under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Delaware Conference. Benjamin and Portia Bird welcomed nine students that first day to a converted farmhouse on 16 acres at what was envisioned to be a feeder school for Baltimore’s Centenary Biblical Institute, which became Morgan College.
By the end of the first academic year, 37 students were enrolled in the Delaware Conference Academy.
Blacks in the 19th and early 20th century could not attend the Maryland Agricultural College in College Park, which offered advanced instruction in the latest farming techniques and related trades commonplace in that era.
When Congress enacted the Second Morrill Act of 1890 committing funds to support historically Black land-grant institutions, the state of Maryland entered into a joint-management agreement with Morgan to funnel that federal aid to support parallel instruction in rural Somerset County like that taught in College Park. For Black students who wanted to go on to higher education, Princess Anne also remained a pipeline to Morgan in Baltimore.
By the spring of 1891, the Methodist Episcopal Church1 was already referring to the school as Princess Anne Academy, although in some circles it informally was referred to as Morgan’s “industrial branch.”
The public-private partnership between the state of Maryland and church-run Morgan also gave rise to a third name for the school: the Eastern Branch of Maryland Agricultural College, according to state archives as well as Morgan College documents.
The academy’s 1930-31 student handbook and course catalog describes the Princess Anne campus as an “ideal location with (a) healthful climate (that) presents one of the most beautiful sites on the Eastern Shore.” In the early 1930s, Delaware Conference church documents hinted Princess Anne Academy was destined to pass to state control once an acquisition price could be worked out with the governing board of Morgan College. By the spring of 1934, the institution had a new name: Princess Anne Junior College, a reflection of the expansion of academic offerings.2
In the midst of the Great Depression, Maryland courts directed the state to admit qualified Black applicants to its publicly funded law school in Baltimore, a ruling historians posit hastened Princess Anne Academy’s transition to becoming a full-fledged public institution. Fifty years after opening, the state of Maryland made the first of four $25,000 payments to purchase the school in Princess Anne as it was evolving into a baccalaureate degree-granting college. The state’s larger, traditionally white institution in College Park was designated its “administrative agency.”
In 1948, the Eastern Shore Branch of the University of Maryland, alternately also known as Princess Anne College, was rechristened Maryland State College, a division of the University of Maryland.
Maryland State College became the University of Maryland Eastern Shore3 on July 1, 1970, although there had been a proposal to call the institution the University of Maryland – Princess Anne.
At its 125th anniversary, UMES was among 12 University System of Maryland public institutions of higher education, a 745-acre doctoral-research university preparing its graduates for the 21st century.
(1) – Minutes of the 28th session of the Delaware Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, April 1, 1891; pg. 54.
(2) – Official journal and yearbook of the Delaware Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 71st session, April 4-11, 1934; pg. 209.
(3) – State government reorganized public higher education in 1988 and included UMES as part of the University of Maryland System ~ known at the institution’s 125th anniversary as the University System of Maryland. The nine counties east of the Chesapeake Bay — Somerset, Worcester, Wicomico, Dorchester, Talbot, Caroline, Queen Anne’s, Kent and Cecil — are collectively known by the regional name “Eastern Shore.”
