Simon Walter Stauffer (1888-1975)

(Simon) Walter Stauffer was born in Walkersville, Maryland on August 1888 the son of John Hanson and Ellen Nelson Stauffer. He attended area public schools, then Conway Hall Preparatory School in 1906 and 1907, and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He became a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and graduated with the class of 1912.

After a time in Maryland as an insurance agent, he moved to York, Pennsylvania and began a career as an executive in the manufacture of lime and crushed stone. He, in fact, became president of the National Lime Association between 1936 and 1946. He was involved also in other concerns in banking, timber, and utilities. He was vice president and chairman of the executive committee of the York County Gas Company from 1950 to 1960, and a director of the Columbia Water Company. He was elected to the Eighty-third United States Congress in late 1952 as a Republican. He lost his next election in 1954 but regained his seat in the Eighty-fifth Congress in 1956, only to fail again in re-election in 1958.

He was married in October, 1920 to Salome Baker of York and the couple had one daughter, Mary Salome Stauffer, in November, 1923. A lifelong Methodist, he was named as a trustee of Dickinson College in 1930 and served in that capacity for forty-five years until his death. He sponsored, with Gettysburg College trustee George Hummell, the Dickinson-Gettysburg Football Trophy and, in memory of his wife after her death endowed the Joseph Priestley Chair of Natural Philosophy.

S. Walter Stauffer died in his hometown of York, Pennsylvania on September 26, 1975. He was buried in the Prospect Hill Cemetery.