In January 1910, at age 26, Ota Benga moved to Lynchburg to attend Virginia Theological Seminary and College, a black Baptist school located in Durmid, a suburb south of the city. Ever since the scandal at the zoo, and largely thanks to the advocacy of seminary president Gregory W. Hayes, Benga's guardians had sought to send him to Lynchburg. They believed the seminary would give him the best chance to receive a formal education and convert to Christianity, and, in doing so, he would support their larger goal of proving that Africans did not possess inferior intelligence.

The close-knit seminary community embraced Benga. He lived in the heart of campus, first with widowed store owner Josephine Anderson and later with Mary Rice Hayes, Gregory Hayes's widow and a former seminary president herself. Benga tried attending elementary classes at the college, but he gradually gave up his formal education for other pursuits. He did chores and odd jobs in exchange for room and board, and he earned a modest income as a day laborer and tobacco factory worker.

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During his years in Lynchburg, Benga tried to integrate into American culture and adopt local ways of life. When he hunted, he alternated bows and arrows with shotguns or rifles. He had a dentist cap his filed teeth to make his smile less startling. Around the seminary and throughout the city he became known by the less exotic name Otto Bingo.

Benga spent most of his free time in forests and the countryside. He often hunted with a small band of young admirers, including Mary Rice Hayes's three sons and Chauncey Spencer. He taught them to hunt, fish, and gather wild honey just as he had done in the forests of the Congo. Benga also befriended Chauncey's mother, Anne Spencer, a poet who taught at the seminary. He and Spencer shared a special affinity for the natural world, and he was a frequent visitor to her renowned garden, Edankraal, on Pierce Street.