Solano County Biographies

REV. DAVID F. MacDONALD, D. D.

Transcribed by Kathy Sedler

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm

 
Rector of the Church of the Ascension, Vallejo, is a native of Rosshire, 
Scotland, having been born there in the year 1837.  He received his early 
education in Inverness, the capital of the Highlands, and thereafter prosecuted 
his studies at the Edinburgh University, at which seat of learning he received 
the degree of Master of Arts.  In 1854 he was sent with Letters Dismissary by 
the Lord Bishop of Moray and Ross, the present Primate of the Scottish 
Episcopacy, to the Bishop of California, and arrived in that State in September, 
1855, and was, shortly after, ordained by Bishop Ingraham Kip in the old Trinity 
Church, in San Francisco, his being the first Episcopal ordination held on the 
Pacific Coast.
            In the following year he was directed by the Bishop to assume charge 
of the missionary district of Benicia, where he performed service in a temporary 
building fitted up for the purpose.  While there Doctor MacDonald was the 
spiritual adviser of Beverly Wells, the first criminal hanged in Solano county.  
From Benicia he was moved to Coloma, El Dorado county, where he continued his 
missionary labors for two years, and built a church, and established a 
congregation at Hangtown (now Placerville).  In 1859 he was called, as Rector, 
to St. John�s Church, Stockton, where he labored for two years further, and, on 
the breaking out of the war, he proceeded to North Carolina, and followed the 
fortunes of the Southern army, until peace was declared.  At this period he was 
the recipient of a call to St. James�, Olean, Western New York, where he 
remained three years, and from there was called to Sag-Harbor, Long Island, 
having charge of the Episcopal Church there for seven years.  In 1875 he went to 
Sharon, Conn., and, at the end of two years, assumed charge of Baxter County 
School, Arkansas, for one year; he then went to Dardanelles, in that State, 
where he erected St. Paul�s Episcopal Church, of which he was Rector until 1878, 
when he accepted a call to the Church of the Ascension at Vallejo.  Was created 
a Doctor of Divinity in 1859.  Dr. MacDonald married, first, in 1865, Nellie, 
only daughter of Daniel Judd, of Hinsdale, Western New York, who died in 1869, 
by whom he has Flora, born in 1866; and Katie, born in 1869.  He married, 
secondly, at Trinity Church, New York, August 13, 1874, Susannah, daughter of 
George W. Whitaker, of the Manor, Oxford, England.
 
History of Solano County � San Francisco, Cal. - Wood, Alley  & Co., East 
Oakland, pub 1879, pp 371