Frank Scoville Onderdonk

Frank Scovill Onderdonk, minister and missionary, son of Martha Jane (Benham) and Gilbert Onderdonk, was born in Mission Valley, Texas, on May 31, 1871. He received his D.D. from Southwestern University. On October 12, 1892, he married Rowena Tyson; they were parents of four children. Onderdonk was ordained a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1892 and served in the West Texas Conference until 1897, when he went as missionary to San Luis Potosí, Mexico. There he built and managed Trinity Hospital. He was presiding elder and pastor in Mexico City and Guadalajara from 1901 to 1907 and president of Colegio Wesleyano, San Luis Potosí, from 1907 to 1914, when he became superintendent of the Mexican, Italian, and Bohemian Methodist missions in Texas. He was delegate to the Congress on Christian Work in Latin America in Panama in 1916 and to the Latin American Congress in Cuba in 1929. Between 1906 and 1926 he was five times a delegate to the Methodist General Conference and was a delegate to the Ecumenical Methodist Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1931. He made his home in San Antonio until his death on June 7, 1936.