James Gaston Dunsmore (22 October 1848–24 March 1922), founding president of the Dunsmore Business College, was born in Monroe County and was the son of George Washington Dunsmore, a farmer, and Amanda Melvina Crews Dunsmore. He attended Rocky Point Academy in that county and in 1867 began teaching there. On 8 February 1871 Dunsmore married Sarah Ellen Nickell, a relative of the academy's principal. They had seven sons and one daughter. That year Dunsmore received a Master of Accounts degree from the Eastman National Business College, in Poughkeepsie, New York. He then returned to Monroe County, West Virginia, where he became headmaster of Rocky Point. He also founded and for eight years conducted the Dunsmore Business College, in Sink's Grove.

In 1880 Dunsmore moved to Staunton and there taught his classes in business for two years as part of Hoover's Select High School for boys. He also taught in some of the city's other notable schools, including the Augusta Female Seminary (later Mary Baldwin College) and the Virginia Female Institute (later Stuart Hall School). During the summer of 1882 Dunsmore opened and in November 1884 obtained a charter from the General Assembly incorporating another teaching institution also bearing his name, the Dunsmore Commercial and Business College. He seldom used the words "Commercial and" in official publications and advertisements, but he occasionally billed the school as the Dunsmore Business College and Institute. At one point the catalogue termed the practically-oriented institution "A School of Action." For about a decade the college offered courses in accounting, bookkeeping, mercantile law, and penmanship and admitted only men. By 1893, however, Dunsmore was encouraging women to matriculate and had expanded the curriculum to include typewriting and shorthand. The school's 1896 catalogue advocated the acquisition of business skills by women, observing that these skills would prepare them to be self-supporting and avoid both rash, early marriages, and poverty-stricken widowhood.

The Dunsmore Business College had instructed about 450 students by 1890 and more than 1,600 by the end of the century. The enrollment for the 1900–1901 term alone was almost 200. Before the age of community colleges, business colleges such as Dunsmore's offered ambitious young men and women professional training that allowed them opportunities to enter the modern business world with useful professional skills and without going through long apprenticeships or obtaining a time-consuming, expensive higher education. Graduates of the Dunsmore Business College were working in banks and in business and industrial companies throughout western Virginia and West Virginia by the opening years of the twentieth century, when Dunsmore reportedly boasted that graduates of his school ran the mines of West Virginia.

As the college continued to grow in enrollment and influence, it moved into a large, new brick building in Staunton early in the twentieth century. Dunsmore obtained a new charter in February 1914 (dropping the disused words "Commercial and") that allowed the college to confer the degree Master of Accounts and specifically authorized it to offer instruction to both men and women. By the 1920s the college was offering classes in cost accounting, business arithmetic, penmanship, commercial law, wholesale and retail business practices, brokerage and commission business, spelling, filing, secretarial duties, business English, letter writing, stenography, typewriting, accounting, and the use of such modern business equipment as dictaphones, adding and billing machines, and automatic addressing machines. The college continued to operate for half a century after its founder died, although its importance and the size of its student body declined after the 1930s.

Dunsmore was active in Freemasonry. He became a member of the Institute of Accounts (later the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants), in New York, in 1891 and a fellow five years later. He also belonged to the National Association for Accountants and Bookkeepers and to the National Commercial Teachers' Federation. After his wife died on 19 April 1890, Dunsmore was left with eight children, one of whom was an infant. Two years later, on 8 September 1892, he married the twice-widowed Mary Julia Alexander Stephenson McClung in Lewisburg, West Virginia. She had two daughters and one son from her previous marriages, but they had no children together. James Gaston Dunsmore died of chronic nephritis at his home in Staunton on 24 March 1922 and was buried in Thornrose Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Men of Mark in Virginia (1907), 2:109–110 (with birth date), Makers of America: Biographies of Leading Men of Thought and Action (1915), 1:222, 227–230 (portrait facing 222), and Philip Alexander Bruce, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, and Richard L. Morton, History of Virginia (1924), 5:814–815; Monroe Co., W.Va., Marriage Register (1871); Staunton Valley Virginian, 1 June 1882, 31 Jan. 1884; Staunton Vindicator, 16 Sept. 1892; Acts and Joint Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Virginia During the Extra Session of 1884 (1884), 152–153, Library of Virginia (LVA); State Corporate Commission Charter Book, Record Group 112, 83:536–538, LVA; The Dunsmore Commercial and Business College, Staunton, Virginia. A School of Action (1896), quotation; Twenty-Fifth Annual Catalogue of the Dunsmore Business College and Institute of Typewriting, Shorthand, and Penmanship, Staunton, Va. (1896), 22; Katharine L. Brown et al., Staunton's Newtown: Portrait of a Historic District (2005), 228–233; Death Certificate, Augusta Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, LVA; obituary and account of funeral in Staunton News-Leader, 25, 26 Mar. 1922.

Image from Makers of America, vol. 1.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.

How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter, "James Gaston Dunsmore (1848–1922)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dunsmore_James_Gaston, accessed [today's date]).

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