Dobbs, Hoyt M.

Hoyt M. Dobbs was born on November 16, 1878 in Antioch, Alabama to Samuel and Laura Clayton Dobbs. He attended Southern University (now Birmingham-Southern), graduating in 1899; and Vanderbilt University (1904), earning an A.M. and B.D., respectively. He also held honorary doctorates in literature, divinity, and law. Hoyt Dobbs married Lessie Ruth Jackson on November 14, 1906, and the couple had three children.

Dobbs was licensed to preach in 1901 in the North Alabama conference, becoming a full elder in 1908. His early charges were Mt. Vernon Church, Fountain Heights, and Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama; Central and Troost Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri; and First Church in Fort Worth, Texas. He served the Perkins School of Theology between 1916 and 1920 as professor of Christian doctrine and as Dean. Dobbs resigned the deanship in March 1920 after a short tenure and was succeeded by Paul B. Kern.

Though Dobbs had expressed a desire to continue as professor of Christian doctrine, he did not return to SMU for the 1920-1921 academic year. Instead he took a pastoral appointment in Alabama, and in 1922 he was elected bishop. Bishop Dobbs served episcopal areas in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Brazil. One period of service to the North Alabama conference coincided with his own father’s residence there as a presiding elder. As Jesse A. Earl notes in his article on Dobbs in the Encyclopedia of World Methodism, Contemporary Alabamians delighted to tell how the father, even in the intimacies of cabinet meetings, always addressed his son as ‘Bishop,’ and the son always called his father ‘Dr. Dobbs.’

In 1944 Dobbs retired from the episcopacy due to ill health. He died on December 10, 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Sources:

Allen, Joe. Perkins School of Theology . Dallas: SMU Press, 2011.

Earl, Jesse A. Dobbs, Hoyt McWhorter in Encyclopedia of World Methodism vol. I. Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 1974: 697.

Leete, Frederick DeLand. Methodist Bishops. Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1948.

From the guide to the Hoyt M. Dobbs correspondence BridArch 104. 09., 1917-1918, (Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University)