Honorary Degree

Zatae Longsdorff was born on April 16, 1866, the second of six children of William Henry and Lydia R. Haverstick Longsdorff of Centerville, Pennsylvania, a few miles southwest of Carlisle. William Henry, a physician, was a Dickinson graduate of the class of 1856. Zatae’s brother, Harold, graduated from the College in 1879. Zatae continued the family tradition by graduating with the class of 1887, becoming the first female graduate of the College. She obtained a master's degree in cursu from Dickinson in 1890. Sisters Hildegarde (class of 1888), Jessica (class of 1891), and Persis (class of 1894) all attended Dickinson in turn.

After graduation, Zatae pursued medical instruction at Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, earning her degree in 1890. She served a year as an intern at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, and then relocated to Fort Hall Reservation near Blackfoot, Idaho where she became the resident physician for a short time.

A. Gale Straw and Zatae Longsdorf were married November 12, 1891, shortly after Zatae returned to the East. The couple had four children, and Zatae later resumed her medical practice at Elliot Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire. A. Gale Straw died in 1926 after a long illness following his surgical service in the First World War.

Charles Lore was born in Odessa, Delaware on March 16, 1831 the son of Eldad and Priscilla Henderson Lore. He was prepared at Middletown Academy in Delaware and then entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1848. He was a member of the Union Philosophical Society and graduated with his class in June, 1852.

He went on to study the law and after a time as the clerk of the Delaware House of Representatives in 1857, was called to the bar in his home county of New Castle in 1861. He was the draft commissioner for the county during the Civil War. His political career blossomed after the conflict. By 1869 he was attorney-general of Delaware, serving till 1874 and then served two terms as a Democrat in the United States Congress between 1883 and 1887. In 1893, he was named as the chief justice of the state supreme court and was re-appointed in 1897.

He had married Rebecca Bates of Mount Holly, New Jersey on July 7, 1862. He was a life long Methodist. His health deteriorating, he retired from the bench in 1909. Charles Brown Lore died in Wilmington, Delaware on March 6, 1911, ten days before his eightieth birthday.

Robert Samuel Maclay was born on February 2, 1824 in Concord, Pennsylvania, the son of Robert Maclay and Annabella Erwin Maclay, one of nine children. His parents were highly respected members of the community, running a tanning business and actively involved in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Maclay entered Dickinson College in the fall of 1841 and was elected into the Belles Lettres Society. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1845, received his Masters in 1848, and was later honored with a Doctor of Divinity from his alma mater. One year after his graduation, Maclay was ordained in the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. At this time, the Church was suffering the internal struggles that the heated debate over the issue of slavery brought on. In 1847, however, Maclay was appointed as a missionary to China, where he began a lengthy missionary career overseas.

Gilbert Malcolm was born in New York City on October 13, 1892 to Scottish immigrants, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Duff Malcolm. Growing up in the city where his father was a well-known contractor, he attended the Horace Mann School. Among his young adventures was his notoriety as a very early motorcycle racer, setting a local record for an oval track of 70 miles per hour. He later suffered an accident while racing which ruled out any possibility of other athletic participation.

Malcolm entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1911. While an undergraduate, he began his long association with his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi and served as football manager. He had been expelled briefly during his sophomore year for breaching the College hazing regulations, but he graduated nonetheless in 1915. He graduated from the Dickinson School of Law in 1917 and took up employment as a journalist for the Harrisburg Patriot. During the First World War, he served in France with the 79th Division and was a delegate to the organizing meeting of the American Legion in Paris following the war. Malcolm returned to the newspaper, then worked for the Tax Audit Company in Philadelphia before returning to his alma mater in 1922 to begin a remarkable life of service to Dickinson.

Howard Malcom was born on January 19, 1799 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to John J. and Deborah Howard Malcom. He entered DickinsonCollege in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1813 as a part of the class of 1816 but never graduated as the College suffered its first closing of its doors in 1816. Malcom's youthful interest in preaching the Baptist faith had grown in the meantime. He had already received his license to preach before he entered the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1818 and was ordained in April, 1820. He took up his first post in Hudson, New York that same year and served there until 1826 when took on the busy life of a general agent and later secretary of the American Baptist

Sunday School Union. At the same time, he was starting to become involved in missionary work further afield; he became a deputy of the Baptist Missionary Society and later, in 1835, embarked on his own missions to India, Burma, Siam, China, and Africa. Though he was already a well known religious author and speaker, Malcom wrote some of his most noteworthy literature about his missionary travels, notably, in 1839, Travels in South-Eastern Asia, embracing Hindustan, Malaya, Siam, and China, and in 1840, Travels in the Burman Empire. In 1843, largely due to these writings, he received Doctorates of Divinity from Union College and University of Vermont. The previous year, his alma mater, now operating again, had conferred on him the Master of Arts degree.

James Andrew McCauley was born on October 7, 1822 in Cecil County, Maryland to Daniel and Elizabeth McCauley. He prepared for college at the Baltimore Classical Institute in Maryland before entering Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a freshman in September 1844. He was elected to the Union Philosophical Society and he graduated with highest honors in 1847.

After graduation, McCauley entered the Methodist Episcopal Church and joined the Baltimore Conference in 1850. Shortly following this, he married Rachel M. Lightner on July 8, 1851, with whom he had a daughter, Fanny. He was granted a doctor of divinity degree from his alma mater in 1867 and joined the Board of Trustees in 1869. In 1872, McCauley accepted the position as the fourteenth president of the College, remaining as such for the next sixteen years.

Alexander McClelland was born in Schenectady, New York in 1794; not much else is known about his early life. He studied at Union College, graduating at the age of 15. McClelland then began to study theology under Rev. John Anderson of the Associate Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He left shortly thereafter, however, to complete his studies at the Theological Seminary of the Associate Reformed Synod of New York. It was at this institution that he first came in contact with Rev. Dr. John Mitchell Mason, later president of Dickinson College. Completing his theological course at the seminary, McClelland was ordained as a minister and became pastor of the Rutgers Street Presbyterian Church in New York City in 1815. Here he would remain for seven years until he was offered a professorship at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania under his former teacher Mason.

John McClintock was born October 27, 1814 in Philadelphia to Irish immigrants, John and Martha McClintock. He began as a clerk in his father's store, and then became a bookkeeper in the Methodist Book Concern in New York. Here he converted to Methodism and considered joining the ministry. McClintock entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1832 and graduated with high honors three years later. Subsequently, he was awarded a doctorate of divinity degree from the same institution in 1848.

McClintock joined the Dickinson College faculty in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1836 as a professor of mathematics. In 1840 he became professor of Greek and Latin. In 1847, the town of Carlisle charged him with inciting a riot over slavery. He was tried in the county court and was acquitted. A year later, he resigned from the College and became the editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review. McClintock did not cut all ties with the College and served as a trustee from 1849 to 1859. He also maintained his intellectual career, publishing many educational volumes and texts, especially in classical and theological literature.

Louis Emory McComas was born October 28, 1846 near Williamsport, Maryland where his father was in the hardware business. He attended Saint James' College and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1866 in 1863. His cousin, Henry Frederick Angle, was one of his classmates. They both became members of the Belle Lettres Literary Society. While Louis joined Phi Kappa Sigma, Henry became a member of Sigma Chi.

Louis graduated with his class in 1866 and then studied law, being admitted to the Maryland bar in 1868. His influential political career began when he was first elected to Congress in 1883 as a Republican and served several terms until his defeat in 1891. He was secretary of the Republican National Committee during the election campaign of 1892. President Benjamin Harrison named him, meanwhile, to the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. He was subsequently elected to the Senate for a six year term in 1899. At the time he was a professor at Georgetown Law School and continued to teach two courses a semester throughout his term in the Senate. He retired from the Senate and President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to his last post as a justice of the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia in 1905.

Harry W. Nice was born in Washington D.C., on December 5, 1877 the son of Methodist minister Henry Nice and his wife Drucilla Arnold Nice. The family moved to Baltimore, Maryland soon after and he was educated in the public schools there. He was prepared for college at Baltimore City College and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1899 in 1896. He studied at the College for only one year. He left to study law at the University of Maryland, where he graduated with a LL.B degree in 1899.

Nice began a long and distinguished political career with the Republican Party when he was elected to the Baltimore city council in 1903. In swift succession, he served as secretary to the mayor of Baltimore, supervisor of elections in the city, and as a state's attorney. In an initial run for governor in 1919 when he went down to narrow defeat to his law school classmate and grandson of a Dickinsonian in the class of 1853, Albert C. Ritchie. He then distinguished himself as a tax appeal judge between 1920 and 1924 but came to national prominence in 1934 when he defeated the sitting the Democratic governor, his old rival Ritchie, on the unlikely platform that Ritchie was not doing enough in Maryland to aid in President Roosevelt's national recovery efforts. His effective political career came to an end before the end of the decade, however, when he was defeated for re-election in 1938 and again in the 1940 Senate race in Maryland.

Reverend Eugene Allen Noble was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 5, 1865. He prepared for college at Trinity School in New York City and went on to the Centenary Collegiate Institute in Hackettstown, New Jersey. He received a Ph.B. from Wesleyan University in 1891. In 1892, he married Lillian White Osborn, his spouse until her death in 1930. After graduate work at Northwestern University, he became a member of the New York Eastern Conference of the Methodist Church. Noble served in several capacities in the ministry, including a term as the Superintendent of the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn beginning in 1896. He returned to the Centenary Collegiate Institute as president from 1902 to 1908, and thereafter was named as the president of Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the secretary of the First National Peace Congress held in Baltimore in 1911 and was the editor of its proceedings. By this time he had also been awarded honorary degrees from St. John's College, Wesleyan, and Dickinson.

James J. Patterson was born in Philadelphia on June 22, 1838, the son of John and Ellen Van Dyke Patterson. He grew up in rural Juniata County near Academia where his family had taken up farming and local business. He attended local schools and the Tuscarora Academy, the first secondary school in the county, a Presbyterian institution in Academia for which his father had donated land and money. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in September, 1856 with the class of 1859, enrolling in the classical course. While at the College, he was an early member of Phi Kappa Sigma and active in the Belles Lettres Society. Following graduation with his class, he took up the post of principal of Boalsburg Academy in Centre County, Pennsylvania.

On August 8, 1874, George Wesley Pedlow was born in Manistee, Michigan. He attended public schools in Upland, Pennsylvania and Dickinson Preparatory School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania before enrolling in the College proper. At Dickinson, he was a member of Sigma Chi and captain of the football team in 1900.

In 1901, Pedlow graduated from Dickinson, and shortly after, he joined the 6th Pennsylvania Volunteers to fight in the Spanish-American War, though the conflict was resolved before his unit arrived in Cuba. After the War, he returned to Pennsylvania, where he served as principal at Dauphin High School for two years. From Dauphin, he went to Staunton Military Academy as an instructor. Five years later he left Staunton and returned to his hometown of Upland to serve as principal at the high school there for two years. In 1910, he left for a teaching position at Chester High School. At Chester High School, Pedlow finally found a more permanent position, serving as a teacher there until 1924, and then as principal from 1924 to 1941.

Throughout his life, Pedlow valued the education that he had received at Dickinson, and as an educator in the Chester School District, he was responsible for directing many students to the College. In 1942, he received an honorary Master of Arts degree from his alma mater.

Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the second son of Charles and Valeria Fullerton Biddle Penrose on March 24, 1827; his elder brother was William McFunn Penrose. He was educated at the local Dickinson Grammar School and entered Dickinson College proper in 1842, graduating with the class of 1846. He went on to the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and received his medical degree in March 1849.

Esther Popel was born on July 16, 1896 to Joseph Gibbs and Helen King Anderson Popel of Harrisburg, PA. Esther had an older sister, Helen, and a younger brother, Samuel. The 1900 census indicates that her father was a letter carrier and the family lived at 703 State St. According to Esther’s memories, there had been Popels in Harrisburg since 1826 when her paternal grandfather and his free-born parents settled there.

Esther graduated from Central High School in Harrisburg in 1915 and enrolled at Dickinson the following fall. She was the first African American woman to enroll at the college. Esther commuted to campus daily, as Dickinson did not permit African Americans to live on campus at the time. Esther elected to pursue the Latin Scientific curriculum, which emphasized modern languages. She studied French, German, Latin, and Spanish. While at Dickinson, Esther received the 1919 John Patton Memorial Prize, an academic award granted annually to one student from each class.

Esther graduated from Dickinson in 1919. Her academic achievements earned her the distinction of being initiated into the national academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa.

John Reed was born in 1786 on Marsh Creek, in Adams County, the son of General William Reed. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1806 but left before graduation to study law with William Maxwell of nearby Gettysburg. Reed was admitted to the bar and began practice in Westmoreland County. He quickly made a name for himself there and in 1815 he was elected to the Pennsylvania Senate and served as Deputy Attorney General for the state. In July 1820, Governor Findlay named him the President Judge of the Ninth Judicial District, comprising Cumberland, Franklin, Adams, and Perry counties.

Robert Fleming Rich was born in Woolrich in Clinton County, Pennsylvania on June 23, 1883. His parents were Michael Bond Rich, from the famous Pennsylvania textile family, and Ida Belle Shaw. He was schooled at Mercersburg Academy and the Williamsport Commercial College before he entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1903 with the class of 1907. He joined Phi Kappa Psi during his freshman year and played two years on the football team, but left the College in 1906 without graduating to take up a position in the family's Woolrich Woolen Mills. Thus began a long and successful commercial career which saw him become general manager from 1930 to 1959, then president and chairman of the board of Woolrich Woolen Mills. He also engaged in other ventures in banking, manufacturing and utilities.

Rich became active in Republican politics, representing his district as a delegate to the national convention in 1924. In November 1930 he was elected to the Seventy-First Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Edgar R. Kiess. He served for the next twelve years until 1942 when he did not seek renomination, but he returned to the House of Representatives in the Seventy-ninth Congress in 1945 and served another three terms. He retired from politics in early 1951 and devoted himself from then on to his work at Woolrich.

Lewis Guy Rohrbaugh was born on February 24, 1884 in Fowblesburg, near Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Franklin High School in Reisterstown in 1903 and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. During his college years, Rohrbaugh became a member of Alpha Chi Rho, Omicron Delta Kappa and the Union Philosophical Society. He graduated in 1907, studied at Drew Theological Seminary for his B. D. degree and earned his Ph.D. at the State University of Iowa in 1922 in philosophy and religion.

He returned to Dickinson as an associate professor of philosophy and religious education that same year and, in 1930, became professor of philosophy and religion. Rohrbaugh was appointed as the dean of the freshman class in 1933. He later also chaired his department. An ordained Methodist minister, Rohrbaugh was also a theology scholar, publishing books and essays such as Religious Philosophy, The Science of Religion, and A Natural Approach to Philosophy. In 1951, he was appointed to the newly endowed Thomas Bowman Chair of Religion, named for the first graduate of the College to be named a Methodist bishop.

Rohrbaugh married Lillian Mae Heffelbower in 1907 and they had one son, H. Lewis Rohrbaugh, who graduated from Dickinson in 1930. He taught at the College until 1953 when he was accorded professor emeritus status. Lewis Guy Rohrbaugh died on June 30, 1972.

Howard Rubendall was born on May 14, 1910 in Williamstown, Pennsylvania to Charles W. and Lottie Row Rubendall. He grew up in the small ferry town of Millersburg near Harrisburg and attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania from which he graduated in 1931. While at Dickinson he was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity as well as the Omicron Delta Kappa honor society.

Following graduation Rubendall spent three years teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. In 1935, he resumed his studies at the Union Theological Seminary, from which he received his B.D. in 1937. He then began to work in the position of chaplain and chairman of the department of religion at the Hill School until 1941 when he became the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Albany, New York. In 1944, he served as the president of the Northfield Schools, which included the dual positions as the headmaster of Mount Hermon School for Boys and president of Northfield School for Girls in Northfield, Massachusetts. He served in this capacity for seventeen years.

Birth:  April 14, 1834; Washington,Warren County, New Jersey

Death:  April 1, 1918 (age 83); Trenton, New Jersey

Military Service: USA, 1861-67

Unit: 5th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry, 2nd Division of III Corps, Volunteer Army, 3rd Corps Quartermaster

Alma Mater: Dickinson College, B.A. (Class of 1854)

James Fowler Rusling was the fifth of the seven children born to Geishom and Eliza Hankinson Rusling. He was prepared at the Pennington School and entered Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1852, joining the class of 1854. While there he studied the natural sciences and was a member of the Union Philosophical Society. He graduated with his class and immediately took up a teaching post at the Dickinson Williamsport Seminary, where he taught until 1857. He was admitted that year to the Pennsylvania bar and to the New Jersey bar in 1859 when he set up practice in Trenton.

Sylvester Sadler was born in Carlisle on September 29, 1876, and attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania before transferring to Yale like his older brother, Lewis. Unlike Lewis, however, Sylvester completed his studies at Yale with a batchelor's degree and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. At Yale, he was classmates with Clarence Day, Jr., later famous for Life With Father.

After leaving Yale in 1896, Sadler returned to Carlisle and entered the Dickinson School of Law. His father, County Judge Wilbur Fiske Sadler, had in 1890 revived the law school, dormant since the death of Judge John Reed. Wilbur Sadler served as president of the law school, while his old friend and former client, William Trickett, served as dean. Sylvester Sadler thrived under the pedantic bachelor Trickett, and upon earning his law degree, Sylvester Sadler joined the faculty of the school.

Charles Coleman Sellers was born in Overbrook, Pennsylvania on March 16, 1903. He attended Haverford College until 1925, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and went on to earn his master of arts degree from Harvard in 1926. He then went on to a career as an historian and librarian. From 1937 to 1949 Sellers was the bibliographic librarian at Wesleyan University. He became a research associate for the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia in 1947 and remained there until 1951.

By then, he was already curator of the Dickinsoniana collection at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a post he took up in 1949. He became the Librarian of the College in 1956 following the retirement of May Morris. He had also earned his doctorate at Temple during this time and it was awarded in 1957. He also became the librarian of the Waldron Phoenix Belknap Jr. Research Library of American Painting in Wintherthur, Delaware in 1956, remaining in this position for three years. In 1959 he became editor of the American Colonial Painting. With the opening of the May Morris Room in the new Spahr Library, Sellers once again became historian and curator of the Dickinsoniana in 1968. He held this post till his retirement. A grateful Dickinson College awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters in 1979.

Rufus Edmonds Shapley was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on August 4, 1840, the son of Rufus and Susan Shapley and the older brother of William Wallace Shapley. He was educated locally and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle with the class of 1860. While attending he became an active member of the Union Philosophical Society and later on its hundredth anniversary in 1889 returned to give the keynote speech for the occasion. Following his graduation with his class he studied law in the office of William Penrose in Cumberland County. He very briefly served as a private in Company I of the militia's First Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers but this emergency unit was in being for only two short weeks in September 1862 before being broken up.

Nathaniel Smithers was born in Dover, Delaware on October 8, 1818 the son of county prothonotary Nathaniel and Susan Fisher Barratt Smithers. He was educated at Ezra Scovell's school in Dover and then at the West Nottingham Academy under Rev. James Magraw. He gained his undergraduate degree at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania in 1836 and then, after funding his further education with teaching for a year in Maryland, entered the law department of Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1840. He was admitted to the Dover bar and practiced for many years there, beginning in 1841.

Boyd Lee Spahr was born on April 18, 1880, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. There he grew up in the first block of South Market Street; his father was a local merchant. Young Spahr attended Dickinson College's preparatory school in nearby Carlisle, and then matriculated in the College proper with the class of 1900. Charming and athletic, he played tennis and joined Phi Kappa Sigma and the Belles Lettres Society. He was editor of The Dickinsonian and through other activities came to earn the nickname “Yodeler.”

Upon graduation he taught history for a year at the Preparatory School and published a collection of stories, Dickinson Doings. He then enrolled at the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, and he remained a Philadelphian the rest of his days.

Seemingly a figure from a Louis Auchincloss novel, Boyd Lee Spahr dominated Dickinson for much of the twentieth century. He served on the Board of Trustees from 1908 until his death in 1970; from 1931 to 1962 he was the Board’s president. Witty and urbane, he deftly governed the College, variously choosing and controlling trustees and presidents to shape Dickinson into an ideal he often declared, “to make Dickinson the best small liberal arts college.”