Class of 1828

James Burnside was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania on February 22, 1809, the eldest son of Judge Thomas Burnside. He prepared at the Bellefonte Academy and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1828, graduating with highest honors. He then studied law in the office of his father and was admitted to the Bellefonte bar in 1830 and began practicing law in his father's firm.

Burnside was elected in October 1844 to the Pennsylvania state legislature and was re-elected the following year. Governor William Bigler named his fellow Centre County resident as the first judge of the newly formed Twenty-Fifth Judicial District on April 20, 1853, and, in October, 1853, his position was confirmed by election.

Burnside married Rachel Cameron, daughter of a fellow judge, on June 2, 1848. The couple had two sons and a daughter. On Friday evening, July 2, 1859, he was thrown from a runaway buggy in Bellefonte and died instantly from a fractured skull. James Burnside was fifty years old.

James Miller McKim was born November 10, 1810 on a farm near Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the second of eight children. Known as Miller McKim, he entered the local Dickinson College at the age of 13 in September 1824. While at Dickinson College, he was active in the Belles Lettres Literary Society and graduated in 1828. George Duffield, a local “new light” Presbyterian minister, influenced him greatly, and McKim became a Presbyterian minister himself in 1831.

His ministry gave way to his involvement in the abolition movement in 1833, when he attended the Philadelphia Conference which formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. A year later, in a town not supportive of the movement, McKim delivered Carlisle’s first anti-slavery speech at his church and started the Carlisle Anti-Slavery Society. In 1836, McKim, recruited by Theodore Weld, began his career as a full-time abolitionist and as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. He attended the first Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Harrisburg in 1838. In 1840 he moved to Philadelphia to become the corresponding secretary of the Society and the editor and manager of its publication, the Pennsylvania Freeman. As such, he became an influential supporter of the underground railroad organizations centered in Philadelphia assisting in the many court cases that emerged after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.