Edward W. Biddle (1852-1931)

Edward William Biddle was born May 3, 1852 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to parents Edward M. Biddle and Julia A. Watts. He completed his preparatory studies at Dickinson Grammar School and entered Dickinson College in 1866 with the class of 1870. During his undergraduate career, he was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma (as his three brothers had also been) and Phi Beta Kappa and was active in the Union Philosophical Society. He graduated from Dickinson with his class in the summer of 1870.

Biddle left Dickinson with the intent to pursue civil engineering, but he soon began studying law in the office of his eccentric cousin William M. Penrose. In 1873, he was accepted to the Cumberland County Bar. He practiced law until 1895, then succeeded Judge Wilbur F. Sadler as president judge of the Cumberland County Court of Common Pleas, serving till 1905. In this he was continuing a family tradition; his maternal grandfather - the well-known Judge Frederick Watts - and great-grandfather had been Cumberland County judges.

College Relationship
Alumnus/Alumna Class Year
Trustee - Years of Service
1898-1931

William Righter Fisher (1849-1932)

William Righter Fisher was born on June 27, 1849 in Bryn Mawr, Lower Merion County, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Hasting's Academy in Philadelphia and in 1867, he entered Dickinson College and he received his bachelor of arts degree three years later. Upon graduation, he taught natural science for one year at the Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. From 1871 to 1874 he studied in Germany at the University of Heidelburg and the University of Munich.

In 1874, Fisher returned to his alma mater and served as the professor of modern languages until 1876, when he was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar Association. Fisher then left Dickinson to practice law in Philadelphia. He was a member of the Franklin Institute, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the National Geographical Society. He also speculated in real estate in the Northwest Territory.

On January 4, 1876, Fisher married Mary Wager and they had a son, Wager, in 1877. Mary was an amateur author and some of her stories were published in The Rural New Yorker. William Righter Fisher died in Bryn Mawr on February 17, 1932, the last surviving graduate of the class of 1870.

College Relationship
Alumnus/Alumna Class Year
Faculty - Years of Service
1874-1876

George Hemminger (1840-1912)

George Hemminger was born on his family's farm west of Carlisle, Pennsylvania on September 8, 1840, the youngest son of twelve children of John and Eliza Heagy Hemminger. He went to local schools and to the Gleason Academy in West Pennsboro Township and then to Pennsylvania College at Gettysburg in 1861. Before he enrolled for his sophomore year, however, he went to Harrisburg with seven classmates to enlist as a private in what was to become Company B of the 138th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, then recruiting in several counties, including Adams.

Hemminger mustered in with his company at Camp Curtin on August 16, 1862 and his unit arrived in the Washington area soon after to guard communication lines and transport stores. Later, in 1863, the 138th began to engage in serious fighting and sustain casualties at Brandy Station, Mine Run, and Locust Grove. The following year saw even heavier action at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. In defense of Washington at Monocracy, Maryland, Private Hemminger was among twenty-one men of his unit Confederate forces captured on July 9, 1864 and soon found himself in a prison camp at Danville, Virginia. He was transferred to the notorious Libby Prison in Richmond in February 1865 and was paroled in March 1865. He returned to his company in time to celebrate the end of the war and participate with the 138th in the grand victory parade in Washington on June 8, 1865.

College Relationship
Alumnus/Alumna Class Year