Appalachian Figure
On the ridges around Oakland, Maryland, road cuts slice through layer after layer of sandstone and shale. For most drivers they are just brown walls along the highway. For Daniel E. Wonderly, a kid from Mountain Lake Park who grew up to be a biologist and Bible teacher, those layers were what he later called God’s “time records” in stone.
Across a long career that took him from Garrett County to North Carolina, Indiana, and back home again, Wonderly became one of the most outspoken conservative Christians arguing that the ancient rocks under Appalachia told a very old story of Earth’s past. His willingness to cross swords with young earth creationists made his name a lightning rod in late twentieth century debates over creation, evolution, and the Bible, yet his life never drifted far from the hills where he was born
Garrett County Roots
Daniel Earl Wonderly was born on 21 April 1922 in Mountain Lake Park, Maryland, a few miles south of Oakland in Garrett County. He was the son of Earl Osby Wonderly and Gustava “Gussie” Moomaw Wonderly, part of a family whose name appears again and again in the small cemeteries that dot the Loch Lynn and Oakland area.
He came of age during the Great Depression. In 1940 he graduated from Oakland High School, the local school that served the scattered farms and towns of Garrett County’s western plateau. Like many young Appalachians with religious commitments, his first step after high school was not a big research university but Bible training. He spent two years at Southeastern Bible College before world events intervened.
During the Second World War Wonderly was drafted into the United States Army and served overseas in Europe and Japan. Those years away from Garrett County widened his horizons, but after the war he used his veterans’ benefits to pursue education that would eventually bring him back to his home hills as a scientist and teacher rather than a farmer or coal hand.
From Wheaton to the Salamanders
After the war Wonderly enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois, an evangelical liberal arts school that attracted many returning GIs. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology in 1949. At Wheaton he also met fellow student Edna Giese, a South Dakota farm girl whose German Russian immigrant family had homesteaded on the northern plains.
Edna’s obituary later recalled that she finished a B.S. in education at Wheaton in 1948, then spent decades teaching schoolchildren from the Dakotas to Missouri to rural Maryland, often working unofficially as her husband’s assistant in college biology courses. Their marriage tied together two very different landscapes: her wide prairies and his wooded Appalachian ridges.
After Wheaton, Wonderly turned to theological training at Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City. He earned both a Bachelor of Divinity (1952) and a Master of Theology (1955), deepening the conservative Baptist convictions that would shape his later writings on Genesis and creation.
In the late 1950s he shifted toward formal scientific research. At Ohio University he completed a Master of Science in zoology in 1961, writing a thesis titled “A comparative study of the gross anatomy of the digestive system of some North American salamanders.” It was a classic Appalachian topic: slim, secretive amphibians from the damp woods and springs of the eastern United States, studied with the tools of modern biology.
Wingate, Grace College, and a Growing Storm
The same year he finished his zoology degree, Wonderly began teaching biology at Wingate College in North Carolina, a Baptist school that gave him his first long term academic post. In 1966 he moved to Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, part of the conservative Grace Brethren movement. A 1967 Brethren Missionary Herald faculty list notes “Daniel E. Wonderly (1966), Assistant Professor, Biology,” and names his wife Edna and their children Eunice and Philip, anchoring the family in that campus community.
At Grace College, however, Wonderly’s developing views on geology and the age of the earth soon collided with a very different theological current. During the 1960s Grace increasingly aligned itself with “flood geology” and young earth creationism, influenced by the writings of Seventh day Adventist trained geologist George McCready Price and the popular book The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris.
According to later accounts summarized by historian Ronald L. Numbers, the college administration hired Wonderly only after he agreed that he would not openly challenge Grace’s promotion of a young earth interpretation. When students eventually discovered that their biology professor accepted the scientific evidence for an ancient earth, the college’s president barred him from discussing those views in class, and Wonderly resigned.
The controversy pushed him to turn his quiet reading in geology into a sustained writing project. During the mid 1970s he worked on a large manuscript arguing that sedimentary rocks, including those in the Appalachian region, recorded time spans far longer than a global flood model could plausibly explain.
An Old Earth Baptist from the Appalachian Plateau
Despite the conflict, Wonderly never abandoned the conservative Baptist theology he had learned at Central Baptist Seminary. In an often quoted line from his 1970s correspondence with the American Scientific Affiliation, he argued that Christians discredit the Bible when they reject well established scientific findings. For him, the question was not whether God created but how Christians should read Genesis in light of the physical evidence in rocks and fossils.
His long form answer was God’s Time Records in Ancient Sediments, first published by Crystal Press in 1977. The book walked readers through examples of varved clays, coral reefs, carbonate platforms, and thick sedimentary sequences, many drawn from North American sites, and explained why they pointed to immense spans of time rather than to a single year of catastrophic flooding.
Wonderly followed with Neglect of Geologic Data: Sedimentary Strata Compared with Young Earth Creationist Writings, issued by the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute (IBRI) in 1987 and later made freely available online. In that work he compared specific claims in young earth books with field observations and standard geological literature, urging evangelical readers to check whether flood geologists were quoting data fairly.
Alongside the books came a steady stream of articles and conference papers. His 1974 “Letter to ASA Members: The Young Earth Misunderstanding” urged fellow Christian scientists to oppose misrepresentations of geology in church circles. A 1987 paper, “Some Important Challenges for the Creationist Movement in North America,” combined autobiography with a plea for more honest handling of evidence. Later pieces asked whether creation doctrine could agree with modern geology and explored how to read the “plain sense” of Genesis 1 without flattening its literary richness.
By the early 1990s Wonderly had become, in Numbers’s phrase, one of the names “most despised” by flood geologists, precisely because he took their arguments seriously enough to answer them point by point. Other historians of science have since cited him as a key example of a devout evangelical who embraced an old earth while rejecting a fully naturalistic evolutionism.
Rocks of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Time
Although Wonderly drew examples from around the world, he often turned back to the Appalachian Mountains that framed his home county. Later writers summarizing his work note that he pointed to the twenty to thirty five thousand feet of sedimentary rock in parts of the Appalachians in Virginia and West Virginia and argued that no single flood, however violent, could have deposited such vast, orderly sequences at the rates suggested by young earth models.
He also highlighted the biological nature of many limestones and reef structures. Coral mounds and shell beds in ancient strata, he argued, recorded generations of growth, decay, and reef building that demanded long ages. Those “time records in ancient sediments” became for him a kind of natural chronicle, no less authored by God than the text of Scripture.
For readers in Garrett County and the broader Appalachian region, his books offered a way to look at familiar rock cuts and strip mine highwalls as evidence of deep time without abandoning a high view of the Bible. In that sense Wonderly’s work was not just about abstract debates with California and Texas based creationist ministries. It was about how mountain Christians interpreted the land under their own feet.
Coming Home to Oakland
The Grace College controversy did not send the Wonderlys into exile. In 1974 Daniel and Edna returned to his hometown of Oakland. According to Edna’s obituary, they became active members of Faith Evangelical Free Church in nearby Mountain Lake Park. Edna taught at Swan Meadow School, a public school attended primarily by Amish children, while Daniel continued research, writing, and speaking through IBRI and the American Scientific Affiliation.
Their address on Pleasant Valley Road south of Oakland shows up in both Daniel’s obituary and later IBRI correspondence, a reminder that while his writings were circulating in national debates over creation and evolution, his day to day life unfolded along a quiet rural route in Garrett County.
On 3 December 2004, Daniel E. Wonderly died at Garrett County Memorial Hospital in Oakland at age eighty two. A brief denominational obituary published by the Grace Brethren movement remembered him simply as “Former Grace Prof. Daniel Wonderly,” noting that services were held in Oakland and listing his surviving family.
Edna lived until 2020. Her funeral notice specifies that she was buried in the Wonderly Cemetery in Oakland “next to her husband, Daniel Wonderly,” confirming local family tradition that the couple rests in the small family plot south of Loch Lynn Heights.
Wonderly Cemetery and a Garrett County Family
The Wonderly Cemetery itself appears in Garrett County cemetery indexes as a small burial ground near Loch Lynn, with transcriptions and coordinates preserved through the USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project and related genealogical compilations.
Multiple nineteenth and early twentieth century Wonderlys are buried there, tying Daniel to earlier generations of the family who settled in western Maryland during the era when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and timber companies were first pushing into the highlands. Those older headstones, recorded in volunteer transcriptions, tell a story of migration from Virginia and Pennsylvania into the Garrett County plateau, of farmsteads along Smouse Road, and of kin networks that stretched across state lines but kept returning to the same patch of ground for burial.
By the time Daniel and Edna were laid there, Wonderly Cemetery had become both a literal and symbolic anchor for a family that spanned from German Russian homesteads in the Dakotas to Appalachian classrooms and college laboratories.
Why Daniel Wonderly Matters for Appalachian History
In the broader history of American creationism, Daniel E. Wonderly appears as a case study in Ronald Numbers’s landmark book The Creationists and in later overviews of evangelical science. He is usually described as an old earth Baptist who challenged flood geology from within conservative circles.
Seen from Garrett County, though, he also fits into a more local story. He was one of many Appalachian born men and women who left the mountains for education, war service, or professional work, then came home with new tools for thinking about the landscape they loved. His books invited fellow Christians in the hills to consider the layered rocks of the Blue Ridge and the coal measures of Kentucky and West Virginia not as enemies of faith but as records of God’s long creative history.
In a region where Bible believing churches and fossil rich road cuts stand side by side, Wonderly’s insistence that honesty about geology and loyalty to Scripture belong together remains a live question. The little family cemetery near Loch Lynn, where an old earth geologist and his schoolteacher wife lie under Appalachian soil, is as good a place as any to remember that the mountains keep both our memories and our arguments in stone.
Sources & Further Reading
“Daniel E. Wonderly Memorial Library.” Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute (IBRI). Includes memorial page, obituary scan, autobiographical sketch, and collected writings.
“It [Obituary clipping].” Local newspaper obituary for “Wonderly, 82, of Pleasant Valley Road, Oakland,” reprinted as PDF in the Wonderly Memorial Library, 2004.
“Former Grace Prof. Daniel Wonderly Dies.” Charis Fellowship / Brethren Churches, Dec. 7, 2004.
“Edna Wonderly.” Obituary, C & S Fredlock Funeral Home, Oakland, Maryland, 2020.
Oakland and Loch Lynn cemetery and obituary compilations, including USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project entries and Garrett County cemetery indexes listing Wonderly Cemetery and its burials.
God’s Time Records in Ancient Sediments: Evidences of Long Time Spans in Earth’s History. Crystal Press, 1977; later electronic edition via IBRI. wonderlylib.ibri.org
Neglect of Geologic Data: Sedimentary Strata Compared with Young Earth Creationist Writings. Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, 1987; revised PDF hosted by ASA and IBRI. ASA
“Letter to ASA Members: The Young Earth Misunderstanding.” Open letter distributed through the American Scientific Affiliation, July 1974. rock.geosociety.org
“Some Important Challenges for the Creationist Movement in North America.” Paper presented at the Sixth Annual Baltimore Creation Convention, 1987. ibri.org
“Can Creation Doctrine Agree with Modern Geology?” ca. late 1980s article, Wonderly Memorial Library. Scribd
“Why Was the Anti creationism Movement Able to Arise So Rapidly?” Paper on creationist and anti creationist movements, July 1990, IBRI.
M.S. thesis: “A Comparative Study of the Gross Anatomy of the Digestive System of Some North American Salamanders,” Ohio University, 1961. Scribd
“Daniel E Wonderly (1922 2004).” Social Security and local data compiled at sortedbyname.com, including date and county of death.
Garrett County MD Cemetery Records. LDSGenealogy index linking Wonderly Cemetery to both USGenWeb Archives and Find a Grave entries.
USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project, Garrett County, Maryland, cemetery lists and Wonderly Cemetery transcriptions.
“Daniel E. Wonderly.” Wikipedia biography, summarizing education, military service, academic posts, and role as an old earth creationist.
Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design. University of California Press, 1992 and later editions.
R. G. Hodgson, “God’s Time Records in Ancient Sediments (Book Review).” Pro Rege 8:1 (1979). digitalcommons.cedarville.edu
“Neglect of Geologic Data.” Preface and commentary in ASA PDF edition, American Scientific Affiliation.
Gavin McGrath, “God created (Gen. 1:1)” and related online chapters, treating Wonderly as a key old earth creationist and summarizing his geological arguments about Appalachian strata and flood geology.
“Notable Christians Open to an Old Earth Interpretation.” Archived GeoCities page cataloging figures such as Wonderly who accepted an ancient earth while retaining conservative theology.
Deliver Us from Evolution? A Christian Biologist’s In Depth Look at the Evidence, which cites “devout Christian geologist Daniel Wonderly” and his reef studies as part of an old earth apologetic.