Slavens, Duke

Life Span
to
Dickinson Connection
Class of 1859
    Full name
    Duke Slavens
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    6
    Family
    Mary Taylor (wife, 1861)
    Education
    Dickinson (Carlisle College)
    Occupation
    Clergy
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Methodist

    Duke Slaven (Dickinson Chronicles)

    Scholarship
    Duke Slavens was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky on August 5, 1840.  He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1859. As a student, Slavens became a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity and was elected to the Union Philosophical Society.  He graduated with his class.

    Slavens returned to Kentucky and began preaching in the Methodist Episcopal Church while still nineteen.  He served as a pastor in Illinois and Arkansas, then moved west in 1886 to join the Nebraska Conference.  There, Slavens ministered at LaSalle St. Beatrice, Palmyra, Bennet, Rising City, and Adam. He was also the presiding elder of the York District in the conference and a member of the conference's Standing Committee on Freedman's Aid and Southern Education.

    Slavens married Mary Taylor in 1861, and the couple had six children.  He retired in 1903 and took up residence in Odell, Nebraska.  In January 1920, Slavens and his wife joined their married daughter in the milder climate of Bay City, Texas.  Suffering badly from rheumatism, Duke Slavens died in Bay City on September 14, 1920.  He was eighty years old.
    John Osborne and James W. Gerencser, eds., “Duke Slavens,” Dickinson Chronicles, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/s/ed_slavensD.htm.
    How to Cite This Page: "Slavens, Duke," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/6581.