Thomas Dunham Whitaker
English priest and topographer (1759–1821)
Thomas Dunham Whitaker (8 June 1759 – 18 December 1821) was an English clergyman and topographer who was Vicar of Whalley, from 1809 and Blackburn, from 1818. He undertook landscape improvements in the Cliviger area, and oversaw the planting of approximately half a million trees between 1785 and 1815, winning the gold medal of the Society of Arts for planting 64,000 larches in one year.
Early life
Born at Raynham, Norfolk, on 8 June 1759, he was the son of William Whitaker (1730–1782), curate of Raynham, Norfolk, and his wife Lucy, daughter of Robert Dunham, and widow of Ambrose Allen. In 1760, his father moved to his ancestral house at Holme, in the township of Cliviger, Lancashire, and the boy was, in November 1766, placed under the care of the Rev. John Shaw of Rochdale. In November 1774, after spending a short time with the Rev. William Sheepshanks of Grassington in Craven, he was admitted to St John's College, Cambridge, and went into residence in October 1775. He took the degree of LL.B. in November 1781. His intention to enter the legal profession changed on the death of his father in the following year, when he settled at Holme.
Career
Whitaker was ordained in 1785, but remained without pastoral charge until 1797, when he was licensed to the perpetual curacy of Holme Chapel, where he had rebuilt the chapel at his own cost in 1788.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Dunham Whitaker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.