Degree Recipient

Biographical Details

Date of Birth: September 14, 1807

Birth Location: Danville, KY, USA

Graduation Year(s): 1830

Degree(s) Earned: Bachelors

Date of Death: April 23, 1873

Death Location: Logansport, IN, USA

Life Experience

James Wilson Dunn was born in Kentucky and soon moved to Indiana Territory. He was the eldest of eleven children. Indiana had no public schools at the time so he was educated by his father. His father carried him on horseback through the woods to Bloomington, where in 1825 at age seventeen, he was among the very first students to attend the newly opened Indiana State Seminary (what would become IU).

Dunn’s mother died in 1827, and his father remarried the following year. He was a member of IU’s first graduating class in 1830 (being named Indiana College at that time). After graduation, he studied law in Logansport and became a lifelong supporter of the Presbyterian church there. His brother, William McKee Dunn, also received a bachelor’s degree from IU two years later.

Dunn engaged in various business enterprises throughout his life. At age fifty-six, he enlisted in the Union Army. He was made lieutenant colonel of a regiment of Indiana volunteers and served in Tennessee. He died in 1873.

Marriage and Family

Dunn married Aurelia Palmer in 1837 and had two sons, Williamson Jr. (named after Dunn’s father) and Palmer. Williamson Jr. entered the Naval Academy in 1860 and served the Union in the Civil War. Palmer graduated from Miami University in 1861, enlisted in the Indiana Infantry in March 1862, and distinguished himself at the Battle of Shiloh. Palmer was killed in action in 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga.

Interesting Anecdote

Dunn’s father, Williamson Dunn, was commissioned by President James Madison as a Captain in the War of 1812 and fought native Delaware Indians to protect new Indiana settlements. In 1832, Dunn’s father donated to a group of ministers a fifteen-acre tract to become the site of the new Wabash College in Crawfordsville. This was five years after he had already donated fifty acres of land to begin the private Presbyterian college in Hanover.

Dunn’s first cousin (his father’s brother’s son), George Grundy Dunn, is the man for whom Dunn Meadow, Dunn Woods, Dunn Street, and Dunn Cemetery are named on the Bloomington campus of IU.

References

1. Wylie
2. Findagrave.com
3. cscfamily.org/articles/family/
4. geni.com/people/James-Dunn/
5. in.gov/library/
6. miamialum.org/s/916/16/
7. Banta (1889)
8. Woollen, William Wesley (c. 1900) William McKee Dunn, Brigadier-General, U.S.A.: A Memoir (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons)
9. Indiana University Alumni Quarterly 1920 (#7)
10. Woodburn, James Albert (1926) “Pioneer Presbyterianism” in Indiana Magazine of History December 1926 (Vol. 22 No. 4) pp. 335-370
11. Haas, Katelyn (2017) “Dunn Cemetery sits on IU’s campus quietly but speaks of its history,” Indiana Daily Student 10/30/2017