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 as a pastor in Scituate, Massachusetts, 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.
Sources
- Samuel Dunster, Henry Dunster and His Descendants (1876) [exhaustive biography 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"]
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Last updated on Friday June 27, 2008 at 16:22:54 PDT (GMT -0700)
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