DR. WILLIAM L. DUNN
Was born near Glade Spring, Washington county, on September 15,
1844. He is a son of Dr. Samuel Dunn, of Glade Spring, now eighty-three
years of age, for sixty-one of these years an honored practitioner
of medicine. The father of Dr. Samuel Dunn was Lieutenant William
Dunn, of Old "Mad Anthony" Wayne's brigade, who came from Ireland
at the age of sixteen years, entered the war of the Revolution with the
battle of Bunker Hill, and fought in every battle of his brigade except
Germantown, up to the surrender at Yorktown. Dr. W. L. Dunn is a
greatgrandson of Major William Edmondson, who was second in command
at the battle of Kings Mountain, and whose wife was a sister of
Gen. Zebulon Montgomery of Revolutionary fame.
With such ancestral blood, it is natural that the subject of this
sketch should have made an honorable record in the late war. Entering
service in 1861, before he was seventeen years of age, he served one
year as a private in the 1st Virginia Cavalry, then one year on medical
staff at Richmond, and from that time to the close of the war as assistant
surgeon 43d Virginia Cavalry, better known in the annals of the
war as Col. John Mosby's Battalion of Partisan Rangers. Dr. Dunn
had one brother in service a year, in Col. Peters regiment. Gen. Wm.
E. Jones, killed at Piedmont, was his brother-in-law.
Near Glade Spring, October 12, 1868, Dr. William L. Dunn married
Fannie Beattie. She is a daughter of Absolom Beattie, who married
Eliza Davis, and was born near Glade Spring. Her father is a son of
Captain William Beattie, who fought at Kings Mountain, and was the
last survivor of that memorable battle.
