Upon graduating from Richmond College, John Walker Hundley joins the 26th Virginia Infantry as a second lieutenant, under the command of his uncle, Capt. Napoleon B. Street.
A King and Queen County, Virginia native born in 1841, Hundley had a difficult childhood, his mother dying two years after his birth. College had opened a world of learning to Hundley. His Confederate war time service takes him far from his home state.
Engaged in the Seven Days’ Battles, the 26th Virginia afterward is assigned to the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Assisting in the defense of Charleston, the unit returns to Virginia in the spring of 1864 and is deployed in the grinding defense of Petersburg, hunkered down in trenches. Afterwards, the 26th was active in several skirmishes leading up the surrender at Appomattox, with many soldiers being captured on April 9, 1865 at Saylor’s Creek.
Surviving the war, in 1865 Hundley marries Virginia M. Quarles, of Louisa County, Virginia. The couple grows a large family, having seven children.
Meanwhile, Hundley also continues his education, journeying north to attend Crozer Theological Seminary. After graduation, he returns to Virginia and is ordained as a Baptist minister in November 1876 at Mechanicsville Baptist Church in Hanover County. During his pastoral career, Hundley ministers in communities yet recovering from the devastation – physically, psychologically and financially – of Civil War battles.
“In 1877, he organized a new congregation – the Atlantic Baptist Church – and, throughout the 1870s and 1880s, served as pastor of seven additional churches on the Eastern Shore. In 1890, he was called to Tarboro, North Carolina, where he led the effort to construct a new church building there.
From 1897 to 1904, he served both as the moderator of the Augusta Association of Baptist churches and as the pastor of the Covington (VA) Baptist Church, where he spearheaded the erection of a new sanctuary, which was dedicated in 1902. Following his tenure at Covington, he returned to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland.”
Following many years of faithful ministry, Hundley dies in 1914.
