Mary Jane Dunlap (1814–1906) was born on January 11, 1814, in Fayette County, Kentucky, the daughter of Major William Dunlap III and Oneida Green. She came from one of the oldest and most distinguished Scotch-Irish Presbyterian families of the South. The Dunlap family traced its American roots to Prof. John Dunlap, Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow, who sailed for Virginia in 1730.
At age 22, Mary Jane joined the Presbyterian church and “throughout her long and useful life remained a devout member,” according to her obituary.
On February 11, 1840, she married Joseph Hopper (1782–1860) in Fayette County, Kentucky. Joseph, thirty-two years her senior, was the eldest son of Blackgrove Hopper (1759–1831), a Baptist minister who had migrated from Virginia through Tennessee to Kentucky. Mary Jane and Joseph had two children: Martha “Mattie” Hopper and George Dunlap Hopper (1848–1913). George’s middle name came from his mother’s family.
After Joseph Hopper’s death, Mary Jane married John Owsley on August 2, 1864, in Lincoln County, Kentucky. She spent her early life in Fayette and Garrard counties, but for nearly forty years made her home with her son George in Lincoln County. She died on April 1, 1906, in Stanford, Kentucky, at age 92. She was buried in Buffalo Springs Cemetery, Lincoln County, Kentucky.
Tracing the Dunlap family from a Covenanter minister in Scotland through seven generations to George Dunlap Hopper of Kentucky, and the strain of Presbyterianism that ran through them all. Read More
How the Hopper family moved from Baptist roots to a Presbyterian legacy through the marriage of Joseph Hopper to Mary Jane Dunlap in 1840. Read More
Obituary from The Interior Journal for Mary Jane Owsley, mother of George D. Hopper and devout Presbyterian church member for 70 years. Read More