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The Back Rhodes of Our Genealogy

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Title: History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio
Contributor: Nelson, S.B. & Co., Cincinnati
Publisher: S. b: Nelson & Company, 1894, p. 749-50.

Rev. Dudley Ward Rhodes, D.D., was born February 25, 1849, in Marietta, Ohio. His father, Charles R. Rhodes, was the second son of Dr. Dudley W. Rhodes, of Zanesville, Ohio, one of the earliest surgeons in the State and a pioneer in Masonry. Charles R. Rhodes was an eminent lawyer in Marietta. He married, in 1846, Mary Elizabeth Ward, daughter of Nahun Ward, of Marietta. Mr. Ward came from Shrewsbury, Mass., in 1814, and was one of the largest landowners in the State, and had brought many colonies of Scotch settlers into the Hocking Valley. Through his mother, the subject of this sketch claims descent from Maj.-Gen. Ward, Washington's second in command in the Revolution. The family in which Rev. Dr. Rhodes was reared consisted of five girls and two boys. The eldest daughter is now Mrs. T. Romeyn Buun, of Amsterdam, N. Y.; the second is Mrs. Frank R. Ellis, of Cincinnati; Mrs. Louis Peddingham, of Marietta, Ohio, and Mrs. W. W. Harris, of St. Louis, are his other sisters; one, Mrs. Harriet Denny Harris, having died in 1888. His only brother is Charles Ward Rhodes, of the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Louis. Judge Rhodes, his father, died in 1887, and his mother still lives in the tine old homestead in Marietta.

Dr. Rhodes received all his early education in his native town, passing through the public schools and Marietta College. At the close of his Junior year in Colleg he went abroad and spent a year in Europe with a tutor, and on his return entere the first Senior class in Cornell University, graduating in 1869 in the class wit Hon. J. d: Foraker and Judge Buchwalter. After two years study of law, Dr. Rhodes entered the Philadelphia Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church, graduated, and was ordained a deacon by Bishop Bedell at Easter, 1874, in St. Luke's Church, Marietta, Ohio, where he had been baptized and confirmed. Coming to Cincinnati at ouce he took charge of St. Paul's Church, on Fourth street, in which he was ordained a priest by Bishop Talbot, of Indiana, Advent Sunday, 1874. In May, 1876, he took the rectorship of the Church of Our Savior, Mt. Auburn, which had just organized with twenty-nine members, and without any church building or property whatever. Here he has remained ever since, and has now a handsome stone church and rectory worth §60,000, large schools and societies, and three hundred cominuuicants. In 1875 he married Miss Laura Wiggins, daughter of Samuel b: Wiggins, of St. Louis, who died in 1883 leaving two sons, Goodrich Barbour Rhodes, born in 1876, and Frank Ridgely Rhodes, born in 1877. In 1885, he married Jennie, third daughter of Truman R. and Marietta Handy. Their only child, Helen Marietta Rhodes, was born in 1886, and died in her young beauty in 1894.

Dr. Rhodes has been a voluminous writer and popoular lecturer. "Creed and Greed," a volume of lectures on city misgovernment; '"'Dangers and Duties" [Lippincot, 1880], lectures to young men; ''Marriage and Divorce," and many essays, sermons, poems, etc., have issued from his pen. In 1892 he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from Marietta College. He was the first clergyman ever elected to the directory of the Young Men's Mercantile Library of Cincinnati, and iu 1890 was elected president of the same institution over so strong a competitor as Hon. Charles Fleischman. He has been for ten years a trustee of Kenyon College; for fifteen years the examining chaplain of the Diocese of Southern Ohio, a deputy to the General Convention, chairman of the committee on Canons, and a member of all the important committees of the Diocese. He is also a Son of the Revolution, and chaplain of the Ohio Society.

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