Rev. David Stuart Dodge was born on September 22, 1836, In New York, New York.

He was educated at the Phillips Academy at Andover before attending Yale and later the Union Theological Seminary from where he graduated in 1860. He was ordained in 1864 and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity by Yale in 1899. He befriended Rev. Dr. Daniel Bliss, a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and in 1866, they founded the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, Syria (now Lebanon) with Dodge as the first professor of English and modern languages. He also served as president of the board of trustees of the College, a position he held until his death in 1921. He was president of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, president of the National Temperance Society, and president of the Chester Crest Home for Intemperate Men. Dodge also compiled and edited the biography of his father William Earl Dodge (1805-1883), a businessman and politician, called “Memorials of William E. Dodge” (1887).

In 1860, he married Ellen Ada Phelps (1838–1880) and in 1885, he remarried Elizabeth Scott Boyd (1846-1888). He died on December 17, 1921, in New York, New York.