1842-1924
Adoniram Boardman Dunaway
Baptist Pastor VA/NC
Rev. Adoniram Boardman Dunaway carries the name of two great missionaries to Burma, Adoniram Judson and George Dana Boardman. He was born in Lancaster County, Virginia, 5 October 1842, and died 3 October 1924. He was buried on the date of his birth, October 5, in which would have been the occasion of his 82nd birthday.
Adoniram Dunaway entered the Confederate Army in 1861 when he was 19 years old and served in W.H.F. Lee’s Division of J.E.B. Stuart’s Corps for four years, the entire duration of the Civil War. He was first married to Martha Ellen Kidd in 1864 and they had one daughter but Martha died in 1881. His second wife was Elizabeth Jordan.
Adoniram Boardman Dunaway was determined to enter the Baptist ministry and was ordained in the Lebanon Baptist Church 31 July 1872 at the same time that his cousin, Wayland F. Dunaway, was ordained. He served in various churches in Virginia and two congregations in North Carolina and at the time of the First World War in 1917 he was serving his last pastorate which was Drummondtown Baptist Church at Accomack, Virginia. He received the degree of D. D. from Richmond College in 1897.
About his professional effectiveness, a peer, Rev. W. W. Reynolds, wrote of Adoniram Boardman Dunaway:
I regarded Dr. Dunaway as a most excellent sermonizer. He was at his best in making sermons, that was his delight and he showed an artistic skill in delving to the depths of a text and bringing the hidden jewels to the surface. His sermons were not fossilized nor did they ever grow old for the reason that they were made today and for today. His illustrations were not born of the past but were the living things around him and made his preaching breathe and throb with a living reality of events as they then existed. In the act of preaching, he was very effective, he would thrill you through and through and drive home his thoughts with marvelous skill and force…. But notwithstanding his ability, natural and acquired, he was a modest and diffident man. He could never push himself forward …. Dr. Dunaway had a lovable disposition. He never puffed himself up but he could puff others. He delighted in the success of his younger brethren. There was no jealousy about him.[1]
After rounding out fifty-two years in the ministry of the Baptist faith, Dr. A. B. Dunaway, 82, will, on Sunday, October 28, preach his farewell sermon at the Drummond town Baptist Church, Accomac, VA, which church he has served since January 1, 1911. He will retire from the ministry, making his home with his only child, Mrs. S. B. Carney, of Portsmouth, VA…. he has been considered for a number of years one of the most forceful and able preachers in the State. His retirement from the ministry is deemed a great loss to the Drummondtown Baptist Church as well as to the Southern Baptist Association, in which he has been a leader and organizer for years.[2]
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[1] A. Elizabeth Clendening, compiler, “The Dunaways of Virginia,” (Ogunquit, Maine: Published by S. Judson Dunaway, MCMLIX), p. 57. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 59-14861.
[2] Ibid., pp. 58-59.