page_title: William Holland Wilmer
section_title: Personal life and family
hierarchical_section_title: William Holland Wilmer / Personal life and family
caption_attribution_description: English: Wilmer Hall at Virginia Theological Seminary, June 2014
context_page_description: William Holland Wilmer was an Episcopal priest, teacher and writer in Maryland and Virginia who served briefly as the eleventh president of the College of William and Mary.
context_section_description: Wilmer's first wife, Harriet Ringgold, also of an established family in Kent County, died soon after their marriage. Soon after moving to Alexandria, Wilmer married Marion Hannah Cox of Mount Holly, New Jersey, who died shortly after the birth of their sixth child in 1821 (and is buried at St. Paul's churchyard in Alexandria). Wilmer caused a scandal when he married Ann Brice Fitzhugh (1801-1854), two decades his junior, on February 5, 1823, but they had two children before his death, and she raised her stepchildren.
  Although Wilmer's eldest son, William Porteus, died of yellow fever at age 21 in Natchez, Mississippi shortly after his father, both his brothers ultimately became priests, and two of his sisters also married clergymen (Marion Rebecca marrying Rev. R. Templeton Brown who ended his clerical career in Rockville, Maryland; and Jane Eliza Wilmer married Rev. Samuel Buel of the General Theological Seminary in New York). Richard Hooker Wilmer (aged 11 at his father's death) also worked to support the young family before beginning his clerical career. A firm believer in slavery, he was elected Bishop of Alabama and consecrated by bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America in 1862, and ratified by the General Convention after the war. Bishop Wilmer's son, another William Holland Wilmer (1863-1936) became a prominent ophthalmologist in Washington, D.C., Johns Hopkins University, and the Military Medical Research tLaboratory in Mineola, Long Island. and benefactor of Washington National Cathedral.
  Rev. Wilmer's other surviving son, George Thornton Wilmer (1819-1898), later like his father became rector of Bruton parish and a professor at the College of William and Mary, and after serving as a lieutenant in the Virginia Home Guard, a professor of theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, though he ultimately moved to and died in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. Rev. G.T. Wilmer's son Cary B. Wilmer also became a priest and taught at Sewanee.
  Two of Wilmer's brothers also became Episcopal priests. Lemuel Wilmer became rector at Port Tobacco, Maryland (then a major slave trading port). His brother Simon held posts near the ancestral home in Kent County, Maryland as well as near Philadelphia (including Swedesborough, New Jersey and later Radnor, Pennsylvania) but was disciplined (silenced) by conservative (and new) bishop George Washington Doane for not giving up his affiliation with the Diocese of Pennsylvania (under Bishop William White) while serving as a supply priest for coastal New Jersey parishes without a rector since his departure from Swedesboro after his wife's death. Although this likewise evangelical or Methodist-leaning Rev. Simon Wilmer published a pamphlet in his defense, he ultimately married a rich widow and accepted a position near Washington, D.C. at Christ Episcopal Church in Accokeek, Prince George's County, Maryland. Simon's son Joseph Pere Bell Wilmer (who graduated from VTS in 1834) eventually became Bishop of Louisiana, succeeding (the Fighting) Bishop (and Confederate General) Leonidas Polk and later became known for his support of High Church practices.
caption: Wilmer Hall at VTS
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