Benjamin Donald Gaw came to Richmond College, where he worked his way through, acting as pastor of the East End Baptist Church of Richmond, to graduate in 1906. He had come from Stuart's Draft, Virginia, where he was born on August 20, 1870. He married after his obligation, later taking the bachelor of divinity degree at Colgate. For six years thereafter, he was pastor at the West Washington Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. He died in Washington, D.C., on January 10, 1919, from pneumonia. He is buried in Montgomery, Maryland.