Baird was born in Vanceburg, Kentucky, and attended high schools in Chicago, Illinois and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

[2][3] His father, Lyman Beecher Baird (September 6, 1833 – October 24, 1907), was an Ohio native who worked as a farmer and merchant.

[7] Baird played quarterback for the 1895 Michigan team that compiled an 8–1 record, won seven of their games by shutouts, and outscored their opponents by a combined score of 266 to 14.

Michigan finished the season with a 12–0 win over Western rival, Amos Alonzo Stagg's Chicago Maroons.

At the end of the 1895 season, one Chicago newspaper, the Daily Inter Ocean selected Baird as the substitute quarterback on its All-Western team.

He started as a timekeeper for the Guaranty Construction Co. of Chicago and then as an engineer for Moulton-Starrett Co. of Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[2] In 1899, Baird began a 23-year association with the George A. Fuller Co., a leading builder of skyscrapers and inventor of the modern contracting system.

In December 1900, The New York Times wrote:"No other firm in the world, perhaps, has played so large a part in revolutionizing the building trade as the George A. Fuller Company, and to it primarily is due the credit of having originated many of the actual construction methods now in use.

[17] In November 1918, at the end of hostilities, Baird applied for a passport to travel to France and Belgium to represent the Fuller Company in selling building materials to be used in the post-war reconstruction efforts.

"[4]In 1923, as a building boom created a shortage in skilled construction workers and supervisors, Baird served as Chairman of the Emergency Committee of the Mason Builders' Association.

[18] In 1925, Baird formed his own construction company, the James Baird Construction Co., Inc.[10] Baird and his company specialized in large construction projects and were responsible for the construction of many notable structures, including the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., an addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art that opened in 1928,[19] the dome at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, New York,[20] the Brooklyn Printing Plant of The New York Times (design by Albert Kahn),[14] Hutchins Hall and the Cook Dormitory at the University of Michigan Law School,[21][22] the Aeolian Building in New York,[10] the Ferncliff Mausoleum in Hartsdale, New York,[10] and the original ten buildings of the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia,[23] and the Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

[24] Upon completion of The New York Times' Brooklyn printing plant, the newspaper called the marble, granite, steel, copper and concrete the "jewel box" and noted that no expense had been spared in its construction.

He gave Michigan officials a tour of the University of Arizona campus and presented them with citrus from trees at the Baird residence at 4111 Calle El Centro in Tucson.