Daniel Webster Hill was born in Guns Hill, Virginia in 1865, to Isaac and Nancy Bridgeport Hill. In 1884, he married Stella Geffigen; the couple had two children. Stella Hill died in 1890.
Hill received a bachelor's degree in 1898 from the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University). He attended Yale Divinity School from 1898 to 1899, then continued his theological education at the Newton Theological Institute and Union Theological Seminary. He was ordained as a Baptist minister in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1901, and served as a missionary and field secretary for the New York Colored Baptist Missionary Committee for a year. He briefly served as a financial agent for the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, New York before serving as a minister at a number of churches in New York, Connecticut, and Virginia. He also served as president of the Clifton Forge Normal and Industrial Institute in Clifton Forge, Virginia, where his two daughters were teachers. He died in Virginia in 1919.