Ernest Lynn Waldorf

Who was Ernest Lynn Waldorf?

Ernest Lynn Waldorf was an American Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, elected in 1920.

He was born on a farm in the South Valley, Otsego County, New York. The "Waldruff" family originally came from Holland. Waldorf united with the Central New York Annual Conference of the M.E. Church in 1900. Prior to his election to the Episcopacy, Waldorf served as a Pastor, and as a Chaplain in the 74th Regt. of the National Guard in Buffalo, New York, 1911-15.

His son was football coach Pappy Waldorf.

While a bishop in Kansas City, Missouri in the 1920s he championed a proposed Lincoln and Lee University that would be built on the battlefield of the Battle of Westport. The university would be named for Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee and be built around a proposed national memorial to fallen Civil War soldiers. The school would eventually form the basis of what is the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

He died after a few months illness, on 27 July 1943 in the Noble Foundation Hospital, Alexandria Bay, New York. He was buried in Morningside in Syracuse, New York.