Edward Dromgoole (1751–13 May 1835), Methodist minister, was born in County Sligo, Ireland, to Roman Catholic parents, whose names are not recorded. He trained as a linen weaver. In 1770 Dromgoole converted to Methodism, which was then a movement within Anglicanism. Faced with hostility from some of his family, he emigrated that same year and settled in Frederick, Maryland, where he worked as a tailor.

Encouraged by Robert Strawbridge, an Irish Methodist preacher in Frederick, Dromgoole started preaching in 1772. He traveled in western Maryland early in 1774 and that spring was admitted on trial to the American Methodist conference. Originally assigned to the Baltimore Circuit, which stretched from Pennsylvania to the mouth of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, Dromgoole was transferred that autumn to the Kent Circuit in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In 1775 he became a full member of the conference and was assigned, along with four other preachers, to the Brunswick Circuit, which comprised south-central Virginia and several counties in North Carolina. During his first year there Methodist membership more than doubled.

Unlike many other Methodist preachers, Dromgoole supported the American Revolution. He took the oath of allegiance in Sussex County early in the war. Assigned to the new Carolina Circuit in 1776, Dromgoole read the Declaration of Independence to a congregation in Halifax, North Carolina, at the request of local leaders and prayed for the success of the American cause. He was appointed in spring 1777 to the Amelia Circuit, in autumn 1777 to the Brunswick Circuit, and in 1778 to the Sussex Circuit. On 5 March 1777 Dromgoole executed a marriage bond and on 7 March married Rebecca, or Rebekah, Wallton, one of his Brunswick County converts. The following year her father, a substantial landowner, gave them a 200-acre farm where they resided until they moved in the 1790s to another farm near the present Valentines community. Before she died in 1826, they had six sons, two daughters, and two other children who died young. Two of their sons became Methodist ministers, and their youngest son, George Coke Dromgoole, served in the Convention of 1829–1830 and in the House of Representatives.

Dromgoole traveled often and preached widely during the remainder of the decade and early in the 1780s. When other southern Methodists proposed in 1779 to ordain ministers and thus break completely with the Church of England and with their northern brethren, he opposed the split, limited his circuit riding, and supported Francis Asbury (later general superintendent and bishop) in crafting a compromise. Late in 1782 Dromgoole organized the Camden Circuit in northeastern North Carolina. In 1783 he was back in Virginia, on the Mecklenburg Circuit in the spring and the Brunswick Circuit in the autumn. The next year he was assigned to the Bertie Circuit in North Carolina.

Dromgoole reconsidered his commitment to circuit riding in 1784 after two of his children died and his wife and another child became seriously ill. In December of that year he attended the church conference in Baltimore, known thereafter as the Christmas Conference, at which the Methodist Episcopal Church was formally organized as a denomination separate from the Church of England. Dromgoole was persuaded to ride the Brunswick Circuit in 1785, but he retired from the itinerant ministry in 1786 and served as a local minister at a church known as Dromgoole's Chapel, although he made occasional preaching tours in North Carolina and Ohio. Dromgoole continued his friendship with Asbury, who often stayed at Dromgoole's house during his many tours of Virginia and who ordained Dromgoole as an elder in 1815. Near the end of his life, Dromgoole joined the Methodist Protestant Church, a denomination organized in 1830 in opposition to the power of bishops in the Methodist Episcopal Church.

In addition to preaching and farming, Dromgoole began operating a general store at his house in the mid-1780s. His mercantile business, with his son Edward as a partner, proved successful and eventually included at least four stores. Dromgoole also served as a justice of the Brunswick County Court from 1789 until his death. Influenced by the Christmas Conference's decree that members should free their slaves—a requirement that, he noted, caused prejudice against Methodists even though it was never put into effect—Dromgoole executed a deed in 1791 for the gradual emancipation of eleven slaves. He acquired land in Ohio and expressed a desire to move to "a State where none of the human race are in captivity," but in the end he remained in Virginia. Late in the 1790s Dromgoole began to acquire additional slaves whom he did not free. In his will, signed in November 1833, he bequeathed sixteen slaves to his descendants.

Dromgoole joined Asbury and several other Methodists in founding Ebenezer Academy, the first school in Brunswick County and one of the first Methodist schools in the United States. He helped write its constitution in 1792 and became a trustee when the school was incorporated in 1796. In his will he left $2,000 in trust and directed that the annual interest be used for the "instruction of the poor children of the neighborhood in the Rudiments of a plain English Education." Edward Dromgoole died at his Brunswick County home on 13 May 1835 and was buried in the family graveyard there.

Sources Consulted:
Autobiographical letters to John Wesley, 24 May 1783, Arminian Magazine 14 (1791): 219–220, and to Francis Asbury, n.d. (ca. 1805), 29 Dec. 1805 (noting "now in the fifty fifth year of my age," marriage date, and first quotation), Edward Dromgoole Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; biographies in Daily Richmond Enquirer, 22 May 1847 (by son George Coke Dromgoole, 21 Jan. 1844, noting death "in the 84th year of his age"), Reverend M. H. Moore, Sketches of the Pioneers of Methodism in North Carolina and Virginia (1884), 76–82, and William R. Wright, "Edward Dromgoole—A Pioneer Virginia Preacher," Virginia United Methodist Heritage 9 (spring 1981): 5–9; Stephen E. Bradley, Jr., "Edward Dromgoole's 'Canaan,'" Virginia United Methodist Heritage 30 (spring 2004): 1–5; Brunswick Co. Marriage Bonds (bond dated 5 Mar. 1777); Dromgoole Family Records (1788–1840), Library of Virginia; Edward Dromgoole Memorandum Book (1789–1819), Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; many references in Elmer T. Clark, J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton, eds., The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury (1958); Brunswick Co. Deed Book, 15:93–94; Brunswick Co. Will Book, 12:311–314 (second quotation); obituary in Richmond Enquirer, 19 June 1835 (noting death "in the 84th year of his age").

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by William B. Bynum.

How to cite this page:
William B. Bynum, "Edward Dromgoole (1751–1835)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2020 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dromgoole_Edward, accessed [today's date]).

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