By Kami Nguyen
Adelaide Breed Bayrd is a well-known name in the city of Malden. Organizations across the city receive tens of thousands of dollars in grants every year as “birthday gifts” to commemorate the 19th-century philanthropist. Since 1928, the Adelaide Breed Bayrd Foundation has donated millions of dollars to hospitals, churches, education, and more. Though many in Malden are familiar with the foundation, far less know about the woman for whom it was named.
Bread of Life, a faith-based food security organization in Malden, has received regular annual support from the foundation since it became a nonprofit organization in the mid-1990s. In 2020, the Adelaide Breed Bayrd Foundation made a foundational pledge of $250,000 and an additional $50,000 in 2022 to support their capital campaign: building a new facility that consists of a warehouse, kitchen, dining room, and affordable housing.
Gabriella Snyder Stelmack, executive director of Bread of Life said that the Foundation frequently donates additional funds at the end of every year to support its food programs during the holiday season.
“They’re a tremendous, tremendous partner for Bread of Life and for helping Malden residents who are food insecure, families, senior citizens, disabled people, homeless people, all people that we serve,” she added.
Despite the profound impact the foundation has had on the community, Bayrd’s life remains shrouded in mystery. No photos of her exist. From what little is known, she was a highly accomplished woman who led an extraordinary life—well worth the legacy that the Adelaide Breed Bayrd Foundation keeps alive today.
Bayrd was born in 1843 to Joseph and Eliza Walden Breed. As an eighth-generation descendant of Allen Breed, founder of the city of Lynn in 1634, Bayrd attended Lynn High School and graduated in 1857.
She was educated further by tutors in music and botany, and later by her husband, Captain Arthur Bayrd, from whom she learned to be a master of sea navigation. Captain Bayrd was a merchant, involved in the East India Carrying trade, who was trained from an early age by his uncle, Captain Isaac Beauchamp. He came from a family that also had deep ties to Lynn.
After the Bayrds were married on March 22, 1870, they voyaged the world together multiple times in Captain Bayrd’s clipper ship, South America. In her lifetime Bayrd doubled Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, which both hold notoriously rough waters.
After she died in 1927, Bayrd’s son Frank wrote in a Malden Evening News editorial that, “a thorough academic education supplemented by wide travel, constant study and reading contributed to make her a woman of extraordinary intelligence… She knew the stars and constellations as well as most of us know the names of the streets of our city.”
One of the Bayrds’ most dangerous adventures occurred in the fall of 1872. While traveling through the English Channel, the South America became wrecked off the coast of Normandy, France—Bayrd being the only woman on board.
The event was described in her obituary.
“The ship was driven into the cliffs. The masts were cut away and all were given up for lost when they were rescued by French fishermen and taken to the little village of Treport,” the Malden Evening News wrote.
“[Mrs. Bayrd] was passed over the side of the big ship in a boatswain’s chair into the kindly hands of the French fishermen in their little craft.”
Bayrd moved to Malden in 1874. She became a member of the Maplewood Methodist Church, which she attended and donated to for over fifty years. She also served as an organist and her husband was a trustee of the church.
Bayrd was also involved in several other organizations including the Ladies Aid Society, the Foreign Missionary Society, the Deaconess Aid Society, the Malden Home for Aged Persons, the Maplewood New Century Club, and the Old and New Club.
Upon her death, Bayrd left a note to her son designating money to the Maplewood Methodist Church as yearly gifts. Now, 23 Malden churches of all denominations receive grants from the foundation.
For a long time, Bayrd’s memory was preserved by the work of her only child, Frank A. Bayrd, who founded the Adelaide Breed Bayrd Foundation.
Frank Bayrd was born on September 1, 1873, and graduated from Malden High School in 1890. He studied at Boston University and later became a prominent and beloved member of the Malden community.
Like his father, Bayrd was a staunch Republican, who served as Chairman of Ward 6 in Malden. He was also vice president of the First National Bank and publisher of the Malden Evening News. Those jobs helped grow his sphere of influence in the community, and by effect, expanded the scale of the Foundation’s work.
Bayrd inherited the newspaper from his parents, who were both at one point president of the company that published the Malden Evening News. He used the paper to share stories of the Foundation’s impact. Even after he died in 1940, the Malden Evening News continued to regularly publish articles about the contributions that the Adelaide Breed Bayrd Foundation was making to organizations throughout the community.
Some of its most prominent donations over the years have gone towards construction projects. These include: 95,000 dollars to build a doctor’s residential building at the Malden Hospital in 1957, $67,500 to Malden Home for Aged Persons residents in 1962 for a new elevator, and 100,000 dollars to build the Christ Methodist Church of Maplewood—merging the Maplewood Methodist Church with three other churches nearby—also in 1966.
In Frank Bayrd’s will, he also established 10 scholarships per year to be awarded to Malden High School graduates.
Frank Bayrd married Lenore Blanche Simpson in 1918 and they traveled the world together many times, as his parents once did. The two had no children and Adelaide Breed Bayrd has no living descendants. Her grave is located at Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn.
Her legacy lives on today through the work of trustees like Laura Hodgins, who is vice president of the Foundation.
“My favorite part is when students get scholarships, learning what their dreams for the future are,” she said. “Sometimes we hear back from them and that part is very rewarding.”
Though the Foundation operates quietly nowadays, its impact on non-profit organizations and families in the community over the years continues to be resounding.
“I’m grateful that I can be a part of it,” Hodgins said.
More on the history of Adelaide Breed Bayrd and the foundation can be found on the foundation’s website at bayrd.org/about/history.
Like this article and want to read more upcoming news stories about Malden? Subscribe (for free) to Neighborhood View and get each published story delivered directly to your email. Established in 2014, Neighborhood View is Malden’s citizen journalism publication, a program of Urban Media Arts.
Want to become a citizen reporter for Neighborhood View? Email anne@umaverse.org and learn more!
Be the first to comment