Henry Dunster

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Henry Dunster (November 26, 1609 – February 27, 1659) was an English-American Puritan clergyman and educator. Born at Baleholt, Bury, Lancashire, England to Henry Dunster Sr (1582–1626) and Isabelle Kaye (1583–1643), Dunster studied and graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England specializing in oriental languages and temporarily became a teacher there until he emigrated to Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts in 1640. When Master Nathaniel Eaton was dismissed in 1639 as the first leader of the recently-established Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dunster was appointed as his successor. Thus on August 27, 1640 Dunster became the first president of Harvard. (For a discussion of Dunster's choice of the title "president" see President, history of the term.) He modeled Harvard's educational system on that of the English universities, which included that of Eton College as well as Cambridge University.

In 1653, Dunster refused to have his child – Jonathan (1653–1725) – baptized, confessing himself an antipaedobaptist. For this heterodoxy, he was forced to resign from Harvard in 1654, although it was with much regret that he was sent away, since he was universally well-respected there. He spent the last few years of his life in Scituate, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, as a pastor, before passing away in 1659.

Dunster House, one of the twelve residential houses of Harvard University, is named after Henry Dunster.

Dunster had at least two wives: Elizabeth (Harris) Glover, the widow of Josse Glover, whom he married on June 21, 1641, but who died without issue in 1643; and Elizabeth Atkinson (1627–1690) whom he married in 1644 and bore to him five children. Samuel Dunster, who wrote the exhaustive biography of the descendants of Henry Dunster in 1876, infra, is his direct descendant.

[edit] Sources

  • Samuel Dunster, Henry Dunster and His Descendants (1876) [exhaustive bio by a direct descendant, cf. especially pp. 1–19]
  • Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (1930) [chapter entitled "Henry Dunster, President of Harvard", pp. 183–216]
  • William Thaddeus Harris, Epitaphs From the Old Burying Ground in Cambridge (1845) p. 169 [Henry Dunster, "d. 12.27.1658"]
Preceded by:
Nathaniel Eaton		 President of Harvard University
1640–1654		 Succeeded by:
Charles Chauncy
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