DANCER, ASIEL (ca. 1795-ca. 1849). Asiel (Asahel) Dancer, a Baptist church elder and lay minister, was born, probably around 1795, in Tennessee. Around 1813 he married a woman named Mary, also of Tennessee, and the couple had eleven children. One of their sons, John Dancer, served with Capt. Nicholas M. Dawson^qv and died on September 18, 1842. He is buried with the Dawson and Mier expedition^qv soldiers on Monument Hill overlooking La Grange in Fayette County. Dancer and his wife moved to Texas around 1836, traveling from Tennessee and settling in Bastrop County. In 1839 church elders Dancer and R. G. Green were sent from the Providence Church in Bastrop County to help organize a church in Fayette County, the Plum Grove Baptist Church, often referred to as the Hopewell Church. In October 1839 Dancer, a strong antimissionary Baptist (see BAPTIST CHURCH), was chosen as its pastor. The church was affiliated with the Union Baptists of western Tennessee and evidently split over the missionary question shortly after its inception. In December 1841 Z. N. Morrell^qv became its pastor. Asiel Dancer died in Bastrop County around 1849; his wife died in Bastrop County in 1853.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: James Milton Carroll, A History of Texas Baptists (Dallas: Baptist Standard, 1923). La Grange High School, Fayette County: Past and Present (La Grange, Texas, 1976). Houston Wade, comp., The Dawson Men of Fayette County (Houston, 1932). Leonie Rummel Weyand and Houston Wade, An Early History of Fayette County (La Grange, Texas: La Grange Journal, 1936).

Betty McCarty McAnelly