churches had split in the years before the war over the issue of slavery, and established two regional conferences). Bennett remained affiliated for 50 years with the Freedman's Aid Society. In 1878, freedmen purchased land for a future college campus (which was developed as the current site). Hearing about the college, New York businessman Lyman Bennett (1801–1879) provided $10,000 in funding to build a permanent campus. Bennett died soon after. The college was named Bennett Seminary. Hearing of Bennett's philanthropy, his coworkers commissioned a bell to be made in his honor and continued his mission by donating the bell to the school. In 1888, Bennett Seminary elected its first African-American president, the Reverend Charles N. Grandison. Grandison spearheaded a successful drive to have the school chartered as a four-year college in 1889. Two of the first African-American bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church were graduates of the college, including Robert Elijah Jones, a 1895 graduate. His brother was future Bennett College president David Dallas Jones. Under the direction of Reverend Grandison and succeeding President Jordan Chavis, Bennett College grew from 11 undergraduate students to a total of 251 undergraduates by 1905. The enrollment leveled out in the 1910s at roughly 300. In 1916, a survey conducted by the Phelps-Stokes Foundation recommended Bennett College be converted to a college exclusively for women. The Women's Home Missionary Society, which had supported women at the college since 1886, had found that there was no four-year college exclusively for African-American women, and they wanted to establish such a college. The North Carolina Board of Education offered Bennett College for that purpose. After ten years, during which it studied other locations and conducted fundraising, the Women's Home Missionary Society and the NC Board of Education decided to develop the college in its current location. Bennett fully transitioned to a women's college in 1926. (Note: The Women's Home Missionary Society's on-campus involvement with Bennett women dates back to 1886.) Around this time, Bennett alumni were nicknamed the "Bennett Belles" and the school gained a reputation as an institution of quality. In 1926, David Dallas Jones was installed as president of the new women's college and served. Under his leadership, the college expanded, reaching an enrollment of 400. It became known in the black community as the Vassar College of the South, and Jones recruited faculty, staff and students, from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The school