Letters from a New Campus by Daniel Bliss

A photo of Daniel Bliss on the "New Campus"

To many AUBites, Daniel Bliss remains a vague character of the past. Knowledge of him is generally confined to the fact that he was a founder and the first president of the Syrian Protestant College (1866-1902), whose statue in marble can be seen on campus. Now, however, one particular publication prepared by AUB will give that vague image some real body.

A collection of daily "intimate" letters written by Daniel Bliss from Beirut to his wife and family during their visit to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1873-74 have been compiled by Douglas and Belle Dorman Rugh and Alfred Howell, who found them in the university archives in 1994. The letters, which were written daily but mailed weekly, recount stories of the first president's daily business with faculty, students, and local citizens, and even record meetings with officials of the Ottoman Empire with which the Protestant missionaries were in frequent contact.

The letters had been initially discovered by Bliss's great-granddaughter in 1955 in the old Dorman house on Bliss Street, just before the building was being cleared for destruction. The Dorman house had once been occupied by the Bliss family, and the letters and other papers had lain hidden away in its attic for decades.