Class of 1863

Asbury Jones Clarke was born in Highland County, Virginia on September 14, 1841, the son of James M. and Mary K. Clarke. After preparing at the Baltimore City College and the Light Street Institute, he entered Dickinson in 1862. While at the College, he became a member of Phi Kappa Psi, and just a year after arriving at Dickinson, he graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors. From Dickinson, Clarke attended Albany Law School, where he received a degree in 1866. On September 17, 1872, he married Nannie McElhenney of Wheeling, West Virginia, and the couple had two children, Martha McElhenney and James Morgan. Like his father, James also attended Dickinson, graduating in 1900. A successful lawyer in Wheeling, Clarke served as a trustee of Dickinson from 1903 until his death in 1907.

In 1918, Clarke’s widow donated $50,000 to Dickinson in order to establish the Asbury Jones Clarke Chair of Latin Language and Literature. At the time, this was the largest single gift to the College by a living donor. Under the terms of the professorship, money from the endowment fund was used to pay the chosen professor's salary, with any surplus used to purchase equipment for the Latin department. In 1940, with the permission of Clarke’s son, the name of the chair was changed to the Asbury J. Clarke Chair of Classical Languages and Literature. Today, it exists as the Asbury J. Clarke Chair of Latin.

Birth: April 23, 1842; Newton County, Georgia

Death:  June 27, 1862 (age 20); Richmond, Virginia

Military Service: CSA, 1861-62

Unit: Company B of the First (Orr's) Rifles

Alma Mater: Dickinson College, B.A. (Class of 1863 non-graduate)

William C. Round was born on April 23, 1842 to Methodist minister George Hopkins Round and his wife Mary Louisa McCants Round in Newton County, Georgia where his father was serving. He grew up in Cokesburg, South Carolina. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a member of the class of 1863 in the fall of 1860. There, he joined his brother George Fiske Round of the class of 1861. Like so many other young men of the time, he withdrew from Dickinson, returned home, and enlisted at Abbeville, South Carolina into Company B of the First (Orr's) Rifles in the service of the Confederate States Army in June 1861.

He served in the CSA until his death at the Battle of Gaine's Mill in Virginia on June 27, 1862. He is buried under the Confederate Monument in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. He was twenty years old.

William Wallace Shapley was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1843, the son of Rufus and Susan Shapley and the younger brother of Rufus Shapley. He was educated locally and entered Carlisle's Dickinson College with the class of 1863. He was a member of the Union Philosophical Society but did not graduate. He later studied medicine and took up service in the Unites States Army as an Assistant Surgeon.

Shapley served with the Seventh Infantry in Florida between 1865 and 1869 before it was reassigned to Fort Shaw in the department of the Platte in Montana Territory in the spring of 1870. Conditions were difficult for infantry and Shapley, according to his fellow officers, had become quite stout and was suffering increasing apoplectic attacks. On a particularly arduous march into the Wind River Country, Shapley suffered a brain seizure near Silver Star, Montana and died in the early morning of August 12, 1870. He was buried in a lonely spot on the march, near the Fish Creek Post Office close to the road of the stage coach line. The nearest railway was then four hundred miles away.