Henry Dunlop Dawbarn (14 June 1915–31 December 1998), industrialist and candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia, was born in New York City. His father, Waring Lennox Dawbarn, worked for a furnace company and died on 30 November 1918. His mother Alice Carroll Williams Dawbarn married Robert Dixon Bartlett, a Baltimore attorney, on 22 June 1920. Dawbarn, nicknamed Buz and formally called H. Dunlop Dawbarn, grew up in Baltimore. He attended the South Kent School, in Litchfield, Connecticut, and in 1937 graduated from Princeton University, where he wrote a senior thesis in politics entitled "Government Control and Aid of Commercial Aviation." Dawbarn married Mary Symmes Lawton on 8 February 1941, in Baltimore. Before she died of cancer on 10 May 1967, they had one son and one daughter. On 25 January 1969 Dawbarn married Mary Cameron Buford Wilde, in Fairfax County.
During World War II, Dawbarn likely attended engineering classes at the Johns Hopkins University, but he also worked as a navigator for Pan American Airways, ferrying troops and supplies to South America. He enlisted in the United States Navy in March 1945 and was discharged with the rank of ensign in July 1946. After the war, Dawbarn worked several years for the National Plastics Corporation, in Maryland. In October 1950 he moved to Waynesboro, Virginia, where he and a sibling had started Dawbarn Brothers, Incorporated, in July. The business, which specialized in manufacturing nylon and saran, a kind of plastic film, produced nylon carpet backing and dolls' hair, among other items. W. R. Grace and Company, of New York, bought Dawbarn Brothers in February 1963 for 154,358 shares of Grace stock, then worth about $6 million. Dawbarn remained with the company for several more years as head of its Waynesboro operation, but in 1967 he formed Cam-Mac (later Camac) Corporation, a Bristol-based company that manufactured nylon carpet and fabric for automobiles. He patented several processes in nylon manufacturing, especially of carpet and rope. In 1994 the Science Museum of Virginia honored him with its Outstanding Industrialist Award.
On 21 February 1956 Dawbarn received 36.5 percent of the vote in a three-candidate field to win the seat representing Augusta, Bath, and Highland Counties and the cities of Staunton and Waynesboro at a three-day convention called for March to modify a section of the 1902 constitution to allow state tuition grants to nonsectarian private schools. This tactic was among the measures, known as Massive Resistance, by which many white leaders intended to circumvent public school desegregation ordered in 1954 by the Supreme Court of the United States in Brown v. Board of Education. Describing himself as a Democrat, Dawbarn had promised constituents to ease the provisions of a plan that mandated private-school tuition grants for students enrolled in public schools under court order to desegregate. He offered an amendment allowing communities to decide whether to use their funds to pay for private-school tuition. He believed such local option would benefit those localities that had few Black pupils or had white parents who would permit their children to attend integrated schools. The convention's Committee on Privileges and Elections, on which Dawbarn served, hotly debated his amendment and rejected it. Although his amendment failed as well on the floor of the convention, he joined the other delegates in unanimously approving the modification of the constitution to permit state appropriations for private schools. In committee he opposed reporting a resolution endorsing the doctrine of interposition, an assertion of a state's right to interpose its sovereignty between its citizens and the federal government; and he abstained from voting on the resolution when it came before the full convention.
Dawbarn sat on the Waynesboro city council from September 1960 to August 1964, including two years as vice mayor. By early in the 1960s he supported the Republican Party, citing the need for improved business practices within state government and a balanced two-party political system. After the death of his first wife in 1967, Dawbarn was persuaded to campaign as a Republican for a seat representing Augusta, Highland, and Rockbridge Counties and the cities of Buena Vista, Lexington, Staunton, and Waynesboro in the Senate of Virginia. That November he defeated George Moffett Cochran, a Democrat with more than twenty years' experience in the General Assembly and later an associate justice of the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
In his first term Dawbarn served on the Committees on General Laws and on Education and Public Institutions. His victory marked him as a rising star among Virginia Republicans, and Abner Linwood Holton Jr., who anticipated winning the party's gubernatorial nomination in 1969, pressed him to run for lieutenant governor. After securing the second slot on the ticket at the Roanoke convention, Dawbarn campaigned against Julian Sargeant Reynolds, a youthful Democratic state senator. The contest centered on government efficiency and openness and on whether opponents of the Democratic political machine formerly headed by Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966) could best fight the Democratic organization by voting for a Republican or for a Democrat from outside the Byrd ranks. Holton won the governorship, but Reynolds cast himself as lying far outside the Byrd organization and defeated Dawbarn, 472,853 to 371,246 votes, with another 32,100 votes split between two third-party candidates.
In 1972 Dawbarn won reelection to the Senate of Virginia. During his second term, he served on the Committees on Commerce and Labor, Education and Health, and Privileges and Elections. Holton appointed Dawbarn—long a critic of inefficiency in state government—to head a business panel studying government practices. Dawbarn resigned from the Senate in September 1974, citing the press of his business interests in Bristol. In 1992 he spearheaded an effort to establish the Staunton Augusta Waynesboro Community Foundation, which funded community charities in the region.
During the 1990s Dawbarn moved to Florida. He last sought political office in November 1998, when he lost a bid for a seat on the Loxahatchee River Environmental Control Board, which represented parts of Martin and Palm Beach Counties. Henry Dunlop Dawbarn died on 31 December 1998 while undergoing heart surgery in Jupiter, Florida. He was buried in Riverview Cemetery, in Waynesboro. In 2006 the Young Men's Christian Association of Waynesboro, Virginia, Incorporated, named its building for Dawbarn, who had donated his house to the organization in 1967.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in E. Griffith Dodson, The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1940–1960 (1961), 522–523; feature article in Richmond News Leader, 7 Mar. 1968 (portrait); information provided by daughter Alice Carroll Dawbarn (2007); first marriage in Baltimore Sun, 9 Feb. 1941; second marriage in Marriage Register, Albemarle Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Waynesboro City Council Minutes, Waynesboro Public Library; State Corporation Commission Charter Book, Record Group 112, 233:761–763, 448:361–364, LVA; Waynesboro Circuit Court Deed Book, 76:303; Waynesboro News-Virginian, 22 Feb. 1956, 11, 15 June 1960, 3 Mar. 1969, 6 Sept. 1974, 12 Nov. 2006; Washington Post and Times-Herald, 7 Mar. 1956; Levin Nock Davis, comp., Statement of the Vote Cast for Members of the Constitutional Convention of March 5, 1956 (1956), 7–8; Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the Commonwealth of Virginia to Revise and Amend Sec. 141 of the Constitution of Virginia,… March 5, 6, 7, 1956, and Appendix (1956), 40–46, 61, 89, 101, 164; sound recording, Constitutional Convention Proceedings, 5–7 Mar. 1956, WRVA Radio Collection, Accession 38210, LVA; Linwood Holton, Opportunity Time (2008), 66, 68, 71; James R. Sweeney, ed., Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance: The Diary of David J. Mays, 1954–1959 (2008), 117–121; obituaries in Palm Beach Post, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Waynesboro News Virginian, all 1 Jan. 1999; memorial resolution in Virginia General Assembly, Senate, Journal of the Senate of Virginia (1776– ), 1999 sess., 532–533.
1974 Senate of Virginia legislative photograph courtesy Library of Virginia, Visual Studies Collection.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by G. W. Poindexter.
How to cite this page:
G. W. Poindexter, "Henry Dunlop Dawbarn (1915–1998)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dawbarn_Henry_Dunlop, accessed [today's date]).
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