Daniel Poor

Who was Daniel Poor?

Daniel Poor was a Presbyterian missionary and educator, founder of the first English School in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

Poor graduated at Phillips Academy, Andover in 1805 and Dartmouth in 1811, and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1814 at the age of twenty-five. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church at Newburyport, Massachusetts in June 1815.

He married Susan Bulfinch of Salem, Massachusetts on October 9, 1815 and two weeks after their wedding left for Ceylon on October 23, 1815. He visited with Rev. William Bentley of Salem, a great linguist, who was not impressed with Poor's intentions or abilities. The Poors were accompanied by two more missionary couples James Richards and his wife, as well as Benjamin C. Meigs and his wife and a young bachelor clergyman named Edward Warren. They arrived in Colombo on March 22, 1816 and moved to the Jaffna Peninsula thereafter. The Poors and Edward Warren settled in Tellippalai on 16 October 1816.

Poor pioneered the English education service to Tellippalai and its adjoining villages is magnanimous and admirable and to be remembered for ever by the poor, middle and the upper class folks of the region who had an advantage of high-standard education over the other rural areas of the Jaffna peninsula in the 19th century.