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Thomas U. Dudley

Bishop of Kentucky

Centurion, 1899–1904

Full Name Thomas Underwood Dudley

Born 26 September 1837 in Richmond, Virginia

Died 22 January 1904 in New York (Manhattan), New York

Buried Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, Kentucky

Proposed by William Bispham and Henry Codman Potter

Elected 3 June 1899 at age sixty-one

Century Memorial

Although Bishop Thomas Underwood Dudley had been a member of The Century but a few years at the time of his death, and although the field of his chief activity lay in a distant part of the Union, he had a large circle of acquaintances here and in the city, where at one time he was prominently engaged in the missionary service of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Dr. Underwood took up his life-work at a relatively mature age. Previous to his ordination as Deacon, at the age of thirty in 1867, he had been professor of Latin and Greek in the University of Virginia, in which State he was born, and had served during the term of the civil war in the Confederate army, in which he enlisted at the outbreak of the conflict. Within eight years of his ordination, he was consecrated as Assistant Bishop of Kentucky, and on the death of the venerable Bishop [Benjamin B.] Smith, in 1884, he became Bishop. He was especially interested in missionary work among the negroes of the South, and was connected, as Chancellor, with the famous University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. He was widely known and sincerely respected in all parts of the country, and did much to strengthen that bond of unity between the once warring sections, which consists in the zealous pursuit of common moral and religious aims.

Edward Cary
1905 Century Association Yearbook