David Hugh Dillard (20 August 1889–21 January 1970), businessman and philanthropist, was the son of James Spotswood Dillard, who died in July 1898, and Ella Nathan Woodroof Dillard. He was born in Campbell County and grew up in Lynchburg. After leaving school at about age fourteen, Dillard sold newspapers and worked in a grocery store until 1905, when he became a laborer at the Old Dominion Box Company, a new Lynchburg business that initially manufactured paperboard shoeboxes for the local Craddock-Terry Company (beginning late in December 1938 the Craddock-Terry Shoe Corporation). On 19 March 1913 in Philadelphia, he married Leonora Rosa van Gelder, whom he had met while she attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College (later Randolph College) in Lynchburg. They divorced while she pursued an acting career in New York but remarried in Lynchburg on 17 March 1923. They had one son and two daughters.
Dillard rapidly advanced at the Old Dominion Box Company, which one of his uncles had helped found. In 1907 he became its bookkeeper, in 1908 its foreman, and in 1911 its secretary-treasurer and general manager. Dillard probably owned a substantial interest in the company by the time that he became its president in 1920. He ran the company until 1953, when he relinquished the presidency to his son and became chair of the board. At that time the company employed nearly 275 people in its plants in Lynchburg, Martinsville, and Radford, and it was poised to grow rapidly in the consumer culture of the 1950s that featured much new specialty packaging. Dillard and his son, both well-known opponents of organized labor, resisted union organization of their company. The Old Dominion Box Company merged with the Bristol Paper Box Company, Inc., in 1977.
One of the most prominent and influential businessmen in Lynchburg, Dillard invested in or served on the boards of several other local businesses, including the Craddock-Terry Shoe Corporation, the Dillard Paper Company, Fidelity National Bank in Lynchburg, the Lynchburg National Bank and Trust Company, the Lynchburg Livestock Market, and Quality Dairy Products. He was president of and a major stockholder in WWOD, one of Lynchburg's first radio stations. Dillard purchased five tracts of land in Amherst County, totaling approximately 755 acres, where early in the 1940s he constructed a large mansion that he called The Shelter. He developed a prize-winning dairy herd and hosted riding events at his Homewood farm for hunt clubs and students at the area's women's colleges. Also active in many community affairs, Dillard served from 1946 to 1960 as the first chair of the Lynchburg Hospital Authority. One of his brothers became the general hospital's chief of staff, and the nurses' residence hall there was named in Dillard's honor.
One of Dillard's sisters, Emma Serena Dillard "Queena" Stovall, became a noted folk artist, and his wife was the daughter of a classically trained musician and composer. It was natural that he joined many of the city's other commercial leaders in patronizing the arts. In 1951 he formed the Dillard Foundation, which during the ensuing twelve years donated more than $500,000 to various charities, including the Florence Crittenton Mission, which assisted young, unmarried mothers. Lynchburg College (later the University of Lynchburg) awarded Dillard an honorary doctorate in 1967 and in 1974 named its new fine arts center in his honor. His widow later created a scholarship fund at Randolph-Macon Woman's College.
David Hugh Dillard died in a Lynchburg hospital on 21 January 1970. His cremated remains were scattered at The Shelter. He left an estate valued at $5.7 million.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Philip Alexander Bruce, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, and Richard L. Morton, History of Virginia (1924), 5:129, and Robert C. Glass and Carter Glass Jr., Virginia Democracy (1937), 2:239–241; Birth Register, Campbell Co. Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Lynchburg Marriage Register (1923); Lynchburg News, 21 Mar. 1913, 4 Apr. 1947, 24 June 1960, 10 Apr., 1 June 1971; Darrell Laurant, A City Unto Itself: Lynchburg, Virginia, in the 20th Century (1997), 71–72, 76, 91, 95–96, 173, 266, 318; obituaries in Lynchburg Daily Advance and Richmond News Leader, both 22 Jan. 1970, and Lynchburg News, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Washington Post, all 23 Jan. 1970; editorial tributes in Lynchburg Daily Advance and Lynchburg News (portrait), both 24 Jan. 1970.