Class of 1823

Alfred Armstrong was born on February 14, 1801 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the grandson of Revolutionary War general and founding member of the Dickinson College board of trustees, John Armstrong. He attended local schools and graduated from Dickinson with the class of 1823. A classical scholar, he had a long career as a school teacher and tutor.

Armstrong was a teacher and principal at a long series of academies throughout central Pennsylvania, in Bellefonte, Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg, Columbia, and Hollidaysburg. He was appointed as the principal of Williamsport Boys High School in 1865. In 1871, he left teaching and took a post with the United States Post Office in Washington D.C. and remained there until his death. Alfred Armstrong died on October 21, 1884. He was eighty-three years old.

George Washington Bethune was born into the devout and wealthy family of Divie and Joanna Graham Bethune of New York City on March 18, 1805. His father was a highly successful merchant of Huguenot extraction and both his parents had been born in Scotland. George was privately tutored at home, attended school in Salem, New York, and entered Columbia College in 1819. In January 1822, upon the re-opening of Dickinson College under President John Mason, Bethune came to Carlisle and enrolled and graduated in June 1823. He then studied theology at Princeton and served briefly on a mission to seamen in Charleston, South Carolina in 1826 before being ordained in the Second Presbytery of New York in November 1827.

John C. Young was born in Greencastle, Pennsylvania on August 12, 1803 to John and Mary Clarke Young. His father and his uncle were Presbyterian ministers, and he quickly determined to follow that course. To that end, he was educated at home and then at a classical school in New York City, before entering Columbia College there. After three years at Columbia, he withdrew and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he graduated with the class of 1823.