Alumnus/Alumna

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.

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.

Gustavus C. Bird was born in West River, Maryland on January 4, 1839 to Benjamin Lee and Emily Eversfield Duvall Bird. His father was a prominent physician in the county. Bird entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1857. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity and was elected to the Belles Lettres Society. After graduation in the summer of 1857, Bird attended theological seminary in Alexandria, Virginia.

After his ordination, Bird took up a pastorate in Centreville, Maryland. He moved on to Grace Church in Honesdale, Pennsylvania and then was assistant rector at the Emmanuel Church in Baltimore. In 1872 Bird settled as the rector of St. Martin's Protestant Episcopal Church in Marcus Hook on the Delaware River, which is in the extreme south-eastern corner of Pennsylvania. He served there for twenty-seven years.

Bird married Anna Louisa Hull of New York and the couple had five children between 1867 and 1882. In March 1899, Reverend Bird suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by troubles in the parish. His debilitation was severe enough for him to resign, to be placed in a sanitarium in nearby Lindwood, and his wife and family to move to Philadelphia. Gustavus Claggett Bird died in the Lindwood institution on April 5, 1899. He was sixty.

Roscoe Bonisteel was born in Canada on December 23, 1888 to Milton Fremont and Francis Whyte Bonisteel in Sidney Crossing, Ontario. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1908 as a member of the class of 1912. Before graduating, Bonisteel transferred to the University of Michigan where he received his law degree in 1912.

On September 12, 1914, he married Lillian Coleman Randoph. After serving as a Captain in the United States Army Air Service during the First World War, Bonisteel moved with his young wife to Ann Arbor, Michigan. There he began his career as a lawyer, serving as city attorney from 1921 to 1928. In addition to his professional commitments, Bonisteel served as a trustee for Wayne State University and as a regent for the University of Michigan. He supported the Historical Society of Michigan, serving as a trustee for a number of years.

In 1952, Dickinson College awarded Bonisteel an honorary doctor of laws degree. Seven years later, he was elected to the Board of Trustees. During his years of service to the college, Bonisteel donated funds for a planetarium and observatory, and supported the Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections. Roscoe Osmond Bonisteel died on February 25, 1972.

Abram Bosler was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on September 5, 1884, the son of George Morris Bosler. In 1901, he graduated from the Dickinson Preparatory School, and attended the local Dickinson College as a member of the class of 1905. During his time at the college, Bosler was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and took the science course. He graduated with his class in the early summer of 1905.

After a few months in Wyoming with the family cattle business, he returned to succeed his father as director of the Carlisle Deposit Bank and eventually became its president. He was also involved with the Fidelity and Trust Company of Baltimore. Bosler also served as president of the Carlisle Shoe Company until his retirement in 1929. As a member of perhaps the leading family in Carlisle, he followed extensive civic activities including membership on the board of the Carlisle Hospital and of the Carlisle Country Club. He also served on the Board of Trustees of Dickinson College from 1914 until 1930. He was a Republican and an elected member and president of the city council. He was an active Mason and a member of the St. John's Episcopal Church in Carlisle.

James Bosler was born on April 4, 1833 to Abraham and Eliza Herman Bosler in Silver Spring, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. He attended the Cumberland Academy at New Kingston, Pennsylvania before entering the nearby Dickinson College as a member of the class of 1854 along with his older brother John Herman Bosler. Neither brother finished their degrees and James Bosler withdrew from the College during his junior year and moved west.

From 1852 to 1854, Bosler taught school in Moultrie, Columbiana County, Ohio, where he also built his first store. After the store was destroyed by fire, Bosler moved to Virginia. In Wheeling, Virginia, he was admitted to the Bar, but the life of a lawyer did not suit him. Moving further west in 1855, Bosler partnered with Charles E. Hedges in Sioux City, Iowa in the real estate business. Together they established the Sioux City Bank under the name Bosler & Hedges. Bosler soon expanded his business interests into the growing cattle market, where he made his fortune. He served a brief term in the Iowa State Legislature, before returning to Carlisle in 1866.

J. Herman Bosler was born in Silver Spring, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania on December 14, 1830. He was one of eight children of Abraham and Eliza Herman Bosler, an already distinguished county family active in farming, milling, and distilling. He attended the Cumberland Academy in New Kingston at seventeen and then went on to Dickinson College, entering in 1850 into the class of 1854 with his younger brother James Williamson Bosler. Neither brother completed their course, however, with John Herman withdrawing in 1851 to join his father's business.

James Iverson Boswell was born in Philadelphia on November 3, 1837. He attended the central high school in that city and enrolled at Genesee College in New York in 1856. A year later, Boswell enrolled at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a junior. In the year he was at the College, he was elected to the Belles Lettres Society. Boswell graduated with his class in the early summer of 1858.

Boswell then attended the Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1861 and was later ordained as a Methodist minister. As a member of the Newark Conference, he had a long career as pastor at a string of New Jersey churches located in the following towns: Westfield, Palisade, Mount Hermon, Somerville, Elizabeth (Fulton Street), Newark (Trinity), Newtown, Montclair, Paterson (Cross Street), Jersey City (West Side Avenue), Nyack, Madison, South Orange, Englewood, and Verona. Boswell retired from this particularly mobile ministry of more than four decades in 1903.

In May 1863, Boswell married Cynthia Copeland. James Iverson Boswell died in Ocean Grove, New Jersey on November 30, 1926. He was three weeks past his eighty-ninth birthday.

William James Bowdle was born the son of Amos Bowdle and his wife in Church Creek, Maryland on October 8, 1834. He entered the Dickinson Grammar School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in September 1849 and then joined the undergraduate class of 1854 a year later. His classmates remember "Billy" as the fun-loving and well-liked center for mischief on the campus. He was elected to the Belles Lettres Society and graduated with his class. He then went on to study medicine, gaining his degree in Baltimore in 1856.

He removed to Kansas with the determination to help the territory become a slave-holding state but returned somewhat disillusioned in 1859 to Baltimore. He gave up his practice and enlisted in the United States Navy as a surgeon in 1861; he served for a time as hospital surgeon at the naval hospital on Hilton Head , South Carolina. Following the war, he returned to Dorchester County and practiced medicine there until his death.

While in Kansas, he had married a Southern women. Nothing further is known of his family life. William James Bowdle died at his home in Church Creek, Maryland on August 1, 1876. He was forty-one years old.

Shadrach Bowman was born on May 2, 1829 in Berwick, Pennsylvania. He attended the Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, Pennsylvania before entering Dickinson College in 1853. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Union Philosophical Society. Bowman graduated with the class of 1855, and received his master’s degree from the College in 1864.

From 1855 to 1857 Bowman was a member of the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church; in 1857, he transferred to the Newark Conference. He then served as pastor in several churches in Pennsylvania until he accepted a position at Dickinson College in 1866. As professor of Biblical languages and literature, Bowman gave instruction in Greek and Hebrew. He completed his doctorate in theology from Rutgers College and another in systematic theology from DePauw University in 1870. Bowman left Dickinson in 1871, having failed to institute a new program of Biblical studies at the college.

Bowman returned to preaching, serving congregations in Lock Haven, Bedford, York, and Morristown, New Jersey. From 1877 until 1882, he served on the Board of Trustees of Dickinson College. In 1882, Bowman accepted the position of dean and professor of systematic theology at DePauw University. After seven years there, he served as pastor for three years at Katonah, New York. He returned to teaching at Drew Theological Seminary in 1903.

Thomas Bowman was born in Briarcreek Township near Berwick, Pennsylvania on July 15, 1817. His father was a successful businessman and the family had been Methodists since Francis Asbury had converted, and later ordained, Bowman's grandfather, also named Thomas, in 1780. Young Thomas was educated in the local schoolhouse and then entered Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts for a year, progressing to the Casenovia Seminary in New York where he studied for three years. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a junior in 1835 and graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1837, the first class to graduate under the management of the Methodist Church.

Raymond Brewer was born on November 23, 1889 to Irvin and Mary Jane Winger Brewer in Sylvan, Pennsylvania. He attended the Dickinson Preparatory School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania before joining the full undergraduate class of 1916. At Dickinson, Brewer studied the Classical course, and was a member of Theta Chi, Union Philosophical Society, the Y.M.C.A., and Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, he briefly attended Drew Theological Seminary, but the outbreak of the First World War interrupted his studies, and he withdrew to serve as a chaplain in the war. Eventually, Brewer received his bachelor of sacred theology from Boston University in 1921.

Joseph E. Broadwater was born in Accomac County, Virginia to David and Mary Ann White Broadwater on April 29, 1837. He prepared for college at academies in Drummondville, Virginia and Bel-Air, Maryland before entering Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1854. Broadwater was elected to the Belles Lettres Society and graduated with his class in July 1858. He then studied medicine at the University of Maryland and was awarded the M.D. there in 1860.

Broadwater returned home to Virginia's Eastern Shore and took up practice in Temperanceville, Virginia. He spent the remainder of his life there as a family physician. Broadwater was also elected to a term in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1889, and he served as a member of the school board for Accomac County.

Matthew Brown was born in the White Deer Valley of Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, where his father had removed from Carlisle to become one of the earliest settlers in the area. The father, an elder in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, was an active opponent of colonial rule; he died of fever while serving in the Revolutionary War. The two year old Matthew was taken in by an uncle, William Brown, who lived near Harrisburg. As a prominent figure in Dauphin County, Brown was able to provide his adopted son with an education in local schools before enrolling him in Dickinson College in nearby Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Graduating with the class of 1794, Matthew returned to Northumberland County where he began to teach classical school; his intellectual pursuits brought him into contact with such noted individuals as Joseph Priestley. He also began to study divinity in 1796 and three years later he was licensed to preach by the Carlisle Presbytery. He was ordained in 1801.

Philip A. H. Brown was born on January 3, 1842 to John and Sarah Harrison Auld Brown in Baltimore, Maryland. He prepared for his undergraduate years at Lynchburg College in Virginia and then entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1857. While at the College, Brown became a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and was elected to the Belles Lettres Society. He graduated with his class in 1860.

By the spring of 1862, Brown was a sergeant in the Fourth Battery, Maryland Artillery, known also as "the Chesapeake Battery," in the Army of Northern Virginia. He served the Confederacy until the end of the war, mustering out as a sergeant in May 1865. He saw action in some of the larger encounters of the war, including Cedar Mountain, Cold Harbor, and Gettysburg, where his unit lost heavily. Following the war, Brown engaged in the transportation trade. By 1871, he had also completed religious training and was ordained in the Episcopal Church. He served as the seventh rector of Christ Church in Cooperstown, New York between 1872 and 1874. He was also the vicar of the Trinity Parish in Verick Street, New York City from 1875 to 1909.

Brown married Jane Russell Averell Carter of Cooperstown in 1879. The couple had eight children. On September 15, 1909, the Reverend Philip Auld Harrison Brown died and was buried in Cooperstown in the Christ Church graveyard. He was sixty-seven years old.

Samuel Brown was born January 30th, 1769 to Rev. John and Margaret Preston Brown in modern-day Rockbridge County, Virginia. Educated in his father's grammar school, Samuel also studied at Rev. James Waddell’s seminary before entering Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1787. He was elected to the Belles Lettres literary society, and received his BA in 1789. Preparing for the medical profession, Samuel studied with his brother-in-law Alexander Humphreys in Staunton, Virginia and Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia. In 1792, Samuel went to the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen in Scotland, receiving his medical degree from Aberdeen in 1794.

During his career as a physician, Samuel established himself in Bladensburg (Maryland), Lexington (Kentucky), and New Orleans. From 1799 to 1806 he taught chemistry, anatomy and surgery at Transylvania University in Lexington. In 1800, Samuel joined the American Philosophical Society. He is responsible for bringing the smallpox vaccine to Lexington, inoculating more than 500 people by 1802. In 1819, he abandoned plans for an Ohio medical school in favor of the chair of theory and practice of medicine at Transylvania University. He retired in 1825. Among his other accomplishments, Samuel founded the Kappa Lambda Society of Hippocrates, invented a ginseng clarification process, and promoted the practice of lithotrity, a non-invasive method of breaking up bladder stones.

David Bachman Brunner was born on March 7, 1835 in Amity Township, Pennsylvania in what is now Washington County but then Berks. His Lutheran father, John Brunner, was a carpenter who purchased an area farm soon after David was born. His mother was Elizabeth Bachman Brunner and he was one of seven children. David Brunner attended the local log schoolhouse of Daniel Lee from the time he was seven and was apprenticed as a carpenter when he was twelve. He continued his education beyond this, however, and attended the Freeland Academy (now Ursinus College) for long enough to earn money as a local teacher himself. Determined to study the classics further, he entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1856 at the relatively late age of twenty-one. He was an active member of the Union Philosophical Society and graduated with his class in 1860.

Josephine Brunyate was born on April 14, 1879, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the daughter of a prominent clergyman, Edwin Richard Brunyate and his wife Eliza. Home tutored first, she attended the State Model School in Trenton, New Jersey and then entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with advance standing in 1899. She graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in three years in 1901. After her graduation, Brunyate taught in high schools located in Pleasantville, Atlantic City, and Trenton, New Jersey. In August, 1908 she married Arthur J. Meredith of Boston, Massachusetts and had one daughter. Following the death of her husband in 1917, she returned to teaching at the high school in Woodbury, New Jersey.

Andrew Buchanan was born on April 8, 1780 to Andrew and Rachel Gilleylen Buchanan in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Despite the death of his father when young Andrew was five and then the death of his step-father in 1790, Buchanan received an education and enrolled with the class of 1798 at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. After graduating with his class, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in Harrisburg in 1801 and practiced in York, Pennsylvania for a short time before moving his practice to Waynesburg, in Greene County, Pennsylvania in 1803.

One of the earliest practicing lawyers in the district, a political career at the local, state, and national level followed. He became a county commissioner and served in the Pennsylvania Legislature between 1831 and 1835. Buchanan was then elected to the House of Representatives and served between March 1835 and March 1839 first calling himself a Jacksonian in the Twenty-Fourth Congress and then a Democrat in the Twenty-Fifth. After these two terms, which included service as chairman of the politically charged Elections Committee, he retired from politics and devoted himself to his law practice.

James Buchanan, fifteenth president of the United States, was born near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania on April 23, 1791 to parents of Scotch-Irish descent. Buchanan attended the Mercersburg Academy until the fall of 1807, when he entered the junior class of Dickinson College. He found the school to be in "wretched condition" with "no efficient discipline." However, his own behavior while at Dickinson was far from exemplary; he was expelled during the fall vacation of 1808 for bad behavior. After making a pledge of good behavior to his minister, Dr. John King (a college trustee), Buchanan was readmitted to Dickinson. In his senior year, he felt slighted by the faculty because he did not win the top award of the College for which his literary society had nominated him. Buchanan commented, "I left college, . . . feeling little attachment to the Alma Mater."

John Buonocore III, a twenty-year-old Dickinson College junior, was one of five Americans killed in a terrorist attack on Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport on December 27, 1985. Buonocore was standing at the check-in counter of Trans World Airlines when Arab suicide terrorists began hurling hand grenades and firing Kalashnikov rifles at holiday travelers. The attack was aimed at the terminal of El Al, an Israeli airline, and was a reprisal for an Israeli air raid on the headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Tunis, Tunisia on October 1, 1985. There was a similar attack in Vienna at the Schwechat Airport at about the same time on the same day. A total of nineteen people died in the two attacks, including Natasha Simpson, the eleven-year-old daughter of Victor L. Simpson, the Associated Press news editor in Rome. Abu Nidal, an elusive Palestinian terrorist and leader of the infamous Faith Revolutionary Council, was the apparent mastermind behind the attacks.

Only one of the five attacking terrorists survived as airport security forces returned fire. In his clothes, authorities found a note, in Arabic, which read:

“As you have violated our land, our honor, our people, we in exchange will violate everything, even your children to make you feel the sadness of our children. The tears we have shed will be exchanged for blood. The war has started from this moment.”

The letter was signed, “The Martyrs of Palestine.”

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.

Second Lieutenant Burtner died in an automobile accident near Del Rio, Texas, on March 20, 1967, a few days after he had received his wings as an Air Force pilot. A Philosophy and English major and a graduate of the class of 1965, he was the son of Lt. Colonel Clare Paul Burtner and Mrs. Margaret Burt Burtner, both of the class of 1941.

At Dickinson Burtner was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and served all four years on the Student Senate and as its president during his senior year.

Image Note: Cast of The Ghost Train with Paul Burtner at far right in 1938.

On September 25, 1860 in Newman, Georgia, James Hope Caldwell was born to the educator and minister, Dr. John H. Caldwell, and his wife, Elizabeth Hodnett Caldwell. His father was a founder of Andrew College in Cuthbert, Georgia. Caldwell attended the Wilmington Conference Academy before entering Dickinson in 1876. He became a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and ended his senior year as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received a B.A. degree from Dickinson in 1880 and a M.A. degree in 1883.

After leaving Dickinson, Caldwell enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he received his law degree in 1884. That same year, he was admitted to the bar and moved to New York City to practice law. He eventually became a senior partner at Caldwell & Raymond, a firm specializing in municipal and state bond issues. While at Caldwell & Raymond, he served as bond counsel for the cities of Buffalo, Syracuse, Miami Beach, Nashville, and Chattanooga. He also represented several leading motion picture companies when President Taft's Attorney-General George W. Wickersham sued for a dissolution of the motion-picture trust.

Samuel Cushman Caldwell was born on April 10, 1836 in the west end of Old West at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His father, science professor Merritt Caldwell, and his mother had their home on the first and second floors of the college building. Professor Caldwell was forced to resign from his position at Dickinson in March 1848 due to poor health. He died soon after in Portland, Maine. There, the younger Caldwell lived with family, preparing at the Hebron Academy for college. In 1855, Samuel Caldwell returned as a student to Dickinson College, where he was elected to the Union Philosophical Society and graduated with his class in 1858. Caldwell taught Greek and Latin in Maryland and at the Rock River Seminary in Mount Morris, Illinois. He then returned to Portland, Maine to study law. Caldwell was admitted to the bar there in 1863, but took up journalism instead. He worked for The Methodist as assistant editor to George R. Crooks, one of his father's former students of the Dickinson class of 1840.