Qualla: University of Maryland Eastern Shore

University of Maryland Eastern Shore: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NOAA Photo Library, Public domain. Nine students walked into a converted farmhouse on sixteen acres in Princess Anne on September 13, 1886. Benjamin and Portia Bird were waiting for them. By the end of that first academic year, the enrollment had grown to thirty-seven. The school had a brand-new name - the Delaware Conference Academy - and a parent denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, that had founded it as a preparatory school for Black students bound for the Centenary Biblical Institute in Baltimore. Almost everything about the place would change in the next 140 years. The size of the campus. The name on the gate. The denomination, then the absence of any denomination. The crops studied, the degrees offered, the size of the donor checks. What did not change was the school's mission. It was always there to teach Black students from the Lower Eastern Shore.

Image: NOAA Photo Library | Public domain

University of Maryland Eastern Shore: Six Names, One Mission

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maryland GovPics, CC BY 2.0. The school has carried at least six names over its history. It opened in 1886 as the Delaware Conference Academy. In 1890, after Congress passed the Second Morrill Act requiring states to fund land-grant colleges for African American students, the academy became Morgan College's ...

Image: Maryland GovPics | CC BY 2.0

University of Maryland Eastern Shore: Super Bowl III and the Bowling Champions

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Honors Lane, CC BY-SA 3.0. UMES has produced a remarkable run of athletes for a school its size. In the 1968 Super Bowl III, where Joe Namath's New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts, five UMES alumni took the field - Earl Christy, Johnny Sample, and Emerson Boozer for the Jets, and Charlie Stukes and Jim ...

Image: Honors Lane | CC BY-SA 3.0

University of Maryland Eastern Shore: MacKenzie Scott Notices

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit UNU-WIDER from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0. In December 2020, MacKenzie Scott gave UMES twenty million dollars - unrestricted, no strings, no name on the building. Scott had built her giving practice around identifying organizations that worked hard with little, and she sent UMES one of her larger HBCU gifts. Then in Octob...

Image: UNU-WIDER from Helsinki, Finland | CC BY 2.0

University of Maryland Eastern Shore: The Campus and the Marsh

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NOAA Photo Library, Public domain. The main campus covers 745 acres on the outskirts of Princess Anne, the Somerset County seat. The Hawks compete in fifteen Division I sports, seven men's and eight women's, in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference. Five schools organize the academic side: Agricultural and Natural S...

Image: NOAA Photo Library | Public domain

University of Maryland Eastern Shore: Princess Anne

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Honors Lane, CC BY-SA 3.0. Princess Anne, where UMES sits, was laid out in 1733 and named for the daughter of King George II of Great Britain. The town has under three thousand residents and the look of an Eastern Shore county seat that never quite urbanized - brick courthouses, white-painted churches, mar...

Image: Honors Lane | CC BY-SA 3.0