Benjamin Orrs Peers was born on April 20, 1800 in Greenhill, Loudoun County, Virginia, United States. At the age of three he was taken to Kentucky by his father, Valentine Peers, a Revolutionary soldier. First settling in Nicholas County, the Peers family soon removed to Paris, Kentucky.
In 1817 Benjamin Orrs Peers entered Transylvania University, was in 1819 appointed tutor in Latin and Greek there, graduated in 1821, and remained to teach for a year more. Thinking to become a Presbyterian minister he entered the Princeton Theological Seminary but for some unknown reason left at the end of the academic year in 1823. For an equally unknown reason he then withdrew from membership in the Presbyterian church and became an Episcopalian. In 1826 he graduated from the Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia at Alexandria.
In 1826 Benjamin Orrs Peers was ordained the deacon. Attracted by the educational possibilities in connection with religious observances, he established in June 1829 a Mechanics' Institute at Lexington, Kentucky. In the same year he visited certain eastern states to examine systems of public education and collected data, which he afterward used perhaps too energetically. The result of this survey was his founding in the same city an Eclectic Institute in October 1830, in which he applied Pestalozzi's principles. In November 1833 he proposed unsuccessfully that this school be consolidated with Transylvania University. However, in the next month he became professor of moral philosophy, proctor of Morrison College, and acting-president of the Transylvania University. He entered at once upon an active prosecution of his duties.
His published Inaugural Address Delivered at the Opening of Morrison College (1833) shows that Benjamin Orrs Peers looked forward to making of the university something resembling a state normal school. Some of his pronouncements in this speech are surprisingly modern; he held that "the study of no subject, the dead languages, or the more abstruse parts of mathematics for example, need be pursued solely on account of the valuable discipline it affords the mind" and declared that so far as liberal education was concerned "the argument from utility is daily acquiring greater strength". He insisted that it should be the object of a teacher not to impose upon a youth a fixed and arbitrary curriculum but to stimulate his intellect to voluntary effort. The local newspapers, reporting the November ceremonies, paid less attention to this address than to the fact that Morrison College was opened for the first time. He likewise was active in a convention of state teachers called to discuss educational programs. However, he soon came into collision with the trustees of Transylvania University, and their differences focused in a quarrel over the power of appointing members of the faculty, on which he insisted that at least he be consulted.
Still acting-president, on February 14, 1834, he was informed that his "services are no longer useful" and that he was "removed from said office" (Minutes of the board of trustees). After vainly trying to get the trustees to make open charges against him, he brought suit against them, asserting that his dismissal in an equivocal manner had given rise to doubts regarding his character. In 1837 he was obliged through a legal maneuver to abandon this effort at justification. Meantime he had opened a boys' school in Louisville and had become rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church there in 1835.
Benjamin Orrs Peers was later called to New York City to be editor of The Journal of Christian Education in 1838 and to assume charge of the Sunday-school publications of his denomination. He continued his interest in training the young; one of his favorite projects was that which contemplated bringing up the children of each parish through constant catechetical instruction, family worship, and right example. Failing health forced him to travel to a milder climate in the hope of recovery but, returning from Cuba to Louisville, Benjamin Orrs Peers died there on August 20, 1842.
Peers' portrait, painted by Peale, now in the Ehrich Galleries in New York, exhibits a sensitive face and slight body. His scheme of Christian education, published in the Journal of Christian Education (November - December 1841), was given earnest contemporary attention; it was the outgrowth of an earlier book, Christian Education (1836).
Benjamin Orr Peers first married Mary Ann Bell. On September 8, 1835 Mary Ann died in Louisville, Kentucky. She was 29. In March 1839 when Benjamin Orr was 38, he second married Catherine C. Heylin, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Catherine C. died on August 16, 1866 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
