Trustee

Benjamin Rush was born to John and Susanna Harvey Rush on December 24, 1745. The family, which included seven children, lived on a plantation in Byberry, near Philadelphia. When Benjamin was five his father died, leaving his mother to care for the large family. At age eight the young boy was sent to live with an aunt and uncle so as to receive a proper education; he went on to study at the University of New Jersey (now Princeton) and received his bachelor's degree from that institution in 1760. Upon returning to Philadelphia, Rush studied medicine under Dr. John Redman from 1761 until 1766, at which time he departed for Scotland to finish his studies at the University of Edinburgh. Receiving his medical degree in June 1768, Rush traveled on to London to further his training at St. Thomas's Hospital; it was in London that Rush first encountered Benjamin Franklin.

Rush returned to Philadelphia in 1769 and started practicing medicine while also serving as the professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia. He wrote treatises on medical procedure, politics, and abolition, helping to found the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. His writings on the crisis brewing between the colonies and Britain brought him into associations with such leaders as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. At the outbreak of war, Rush joined the continental army as a surgeon and physician.

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.

Samuel Simon Schmucker was born in Hagerstown, Maryland on February 28, 1799, the son of a Lutheran minister John George Schmucker, an immigrant from Germany, and Catherine Gross. His father transferred to York, Pennsylvania in 1809 and Samuel completed his early schooling there at the York Academy. He went on to study at the University of Pennsylvania, entering at fifteen. After a time teaching at York Academy - he was seventeen - and embarking on a missionary journey to Ohio and Kentucky, he entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, and was himself ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1820.

The impact of the precocious young pastor was immediate. Schmucker helped to organize the General Synod of the church in 1820, writing its constitution and hymnal. Just six years later he founded the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania as the first institution of its kind in the United States and became its first president and a faculty member for almost four decades. He also served, in the spirit of ecuminicalism for which he was later to become famous, as a member of the board of trustees of the nearby, Presbyterian dominated, Dickinson College in Carlisle from 1828 to 1832. When Dickinson temporarily closed its doors in 1832 he became the leading founder of Pennsylvania College, later known as Gettysburg College, and remained on its board until his death.

Levi Scott was born on October 11, 1802 in Newcastle County, Delaware near Odessa. Little is known of his early life and education except that he was converted to the Methodist faith on October 16, 1822 at Fieldboro, Delaware and began to study in the church. He was appointed officially as a preacher and joined the Philadelphia Conference in April 1826. He served in various circuits and parishes in the region and was appointed as an elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1834.

After having served as a trustee of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on behalf of the Methodist Conference between 1839 and 1841, Scott became the principal of Dickinson's Grammar School in 1840. During this time, the Grammar School was viewed as a preparatory division for admittance to Dickinson College, offering instruction to between forty and fifty students each year. He resigned from this position in 1843 and returned to his work with the church, although he maintained his contacts with the College and later rejoined its board from 1858 to 1882.

Abraham Herr Smith was born in Manor Township near Millersville, Pennsylvania on March 7, 1815 the son of Jacob Smith, a millwright, and Elizabeth Herr. His parents died when he was eight years old and he and his sister spent the remainder of their childhood with their paternal grandmother. He received early schooling at the Lititz Academy and also studied surveying at the Franklin Institute in Lancaster. After a start at college life at Harrington College, Smith entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and joined the class of 1840. While at the College he was a member of the Union Philosophical Society. Following graduation with his class, Smith read law in Lancaster with John R. Montgomery and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in October 1842.

He soon established a thriving practice in Lancaster and in 1842 was elected to the State house as a Whig, serving one term. He moved on to the State Senate in 1845 and served there until 1848. In state affairs he was particularly active in fiscal responsibility issues concerning the State debt, compulsory education, and the rights of married women. He also worked for the sale of public works. While in the State Senate he was defeated in an election for Speaker by one vote when, according to reports, he refused to vote for himself.

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.”

(Simon) Walter Stauffer was born in Walkersville, Maryland on August 1888 the son of John Hanson and Ellen Nelson Stauffer. He attended area public schools, then Conway Hall Preparatory School in 1906 and 1907, and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He became a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and graduated with the class of 1912.

After a time in Maryland as an insurance agent, he moved to York, Pennsylvania and began a career as an executive in the manufacture of lime and crushed stone. He, in fact, became president of the National Lime Association between 1936 and 1946. He was involved also in other concerns in banking, timber, and utilities. He was vice president and chairman of the executive committee of the York County Gas Company from 1950 to 1960, and a director of the Columbia Water Company. He was elected to the Eighty-third United States Congress in late 1952 as a Republican. He lost his next election in 1954 but regained his seat in the Eighty-fifth Congress in 1956, only to fail again in re-election in 1958.

Glenn E. Todd was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on January 12, 1890 to Robert R. and Phoebe Routzahn Todd. A life-long resident of Carlisle, he attended Carlisle High School, graduating in 1908, and then enrolled at the local Dickinson College. Todd graduated from Dickinson in 1912, but not before becoming an active member of Sigma Chi. He then entered the family business, the Todd Carpet Manufacturing Company, where he would later become co-owner with his brother. During World War I, Todd served as a corporal in the infantry, and on December 24, 1918, he was honorably discharged.

Returning to Carlisle after the War, he became a successful businessman at Todd Carpet and a well known member of the community. In addition to co-owning the carpet business, he became a partner in the Philadelphia Clay Company and the vice-president of the Board of Directors at the Farmers Trust Company. He was also a member of the boards of the Carlisle Hospital, the Mercersburg Academy, and the Homewood Church Homes; president of both the Carlisle Chamber of Commerce and the Carlisle Rotary Club, and a Carlisle Borough council member for fifteen years. Throughout his life, Todd remained involved in Sigma Chi as well, serving as president of the Harrisburg Area Alumni Chapter and treasurer of the Omicron Chapter before being elected to the organization's highest honor, the Order of Constantine.

Jacob Tome was born August 13, 1810 in Hanover, York County, Pennsylvania. After the early death of his father, Tome was forced to quit his education and make his own way in the world. He worked at various jobs throughout the country, even teaching for a short while in a country school, despite the fact he had little formal education. In 1833, he established his permanent home in Port Deposit, Maryland.

Tome found success by investing his labor and money into first a lumber company and then eventually prosperous railroad dealings. He also established banks in Port Deposit, Elkton, and Hagerstown in Maryland, and Fredericksburg, Virginia. Through these ventures, Tome proved to be a remarkable businessman, becoming Cecil County, Maryland's first millionaire.

He would prove to be an ardent philanthropist as well, supporting education in particular. As a trustee of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he pledged $25,000 toward the construction of a science building in 1883. The completed Tome Scientific Building was dedicated on June 24, 1885. Four years later he announced plans to establish a school in Port Deposit. The Jacob Tome Institute (later the Tome School for Boys) was formally opened in September 1894. As a final gesture to his namesake institution, Jacob Tome bequeathed $3 million to the school in the hopes that it might continue to prosper.

Ruby Vale was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on October 19, 1874 the son of of Joseph and Sarah Eyster Vale. His father had been a Civil War cavalry officer. Vale attended the Dickinson Preparatory School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and entered the College proper with the class of 1896 in 1892. He became a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and was elected as a member of Belles Lettres Society. A particularly active and admired student, he edited both the Dickinsonian and the Microcosm. He was also an outstanding athlete who played three years of varsity football as halfback and quarterback and captained the 1895 team.

Following his undergraduate years, he spent a time as the principal of the Milford (Delaware) Classical School. He then enrolled in the Dickinson School of Law and graduated with top honors for his law degree in 1899. Though remaining a resident of Milford, he began his practice before the Pennsylvania bar and developed into a well known lawyer and legal scholar. He also developed his specialty in corporation and insurance law; his offices were by then in Philadelphia. As a legal scholar, he published widely on Pennsylvania law, his best known work was his ten volume Vale's Pennsylvania Digest.

Frederick Watts was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on May 9, 1801. His father was David Watts, a prominent lawyer and member of the first class to graduate from the local Dickinson College. Frederick himself entered Dickinson with the class of 1819 but did not graduate due to the temporary closing of the College in 1816. Frederick went to live with his uncle, William Miles, on Miles' farm in Erie County after the death of David Watts in 1819. However, Henry Miller Watts, Frederick's brother, did graduate from the College in 1824.

James Wilson was born in Scotland, near St. Andrews on September 14, 1742. Between November 1757 and June 1765 he studied at St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh before he emigrated to Philadelphia. He was engaged as a Latin tutor at the College of Philadelphia for a time before he decided to enter a more lucrative profession and took up the law under the tutelage of John Dickinson. He was admitted to the bar in November 1767. He began his practice in Reading, Pennsylvania before moving to the more Scots-Irish town of Carlisle in 1771. There he quickly began a thriving practice in Cumberland County and seven neighboring counties. By 1774 he was well-known and respected; when in July of that year Carlisle came to open a committee on correspondence he was named as its head and also elected to represent the town at the first provincial conference in Philadelphia. At that time he was a Whig and on the extreme wing of that party; his future career would see him become steadily more conservative, to the point that his fellow Carlislians were to burn him in effigy within two decades.

John Armstrong Wright was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Archibald and Jane Berks Wright, on October 7, 1820. He prepared for college at Wibraham Academy in Massachusetts and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1838 in September 1834 when the College reopened under Methodist auspices. A young man of immense size and stature for the time, his career at the College was colorful indeed. He only avoided expulsion for "noise and disrespect" in March 1837 with a direct and formal apology to professor of mathematics Merritt Caldwell, while his membership in Belle Lettres had already seen him fined under society rules for noise and "intoxication." Despite these adventures, the young student also fell under the influence of other professors like John McClintock and John Price Durbin and graduated with an ambition to be a civil engineer and to maintain an abiding connection to the Methodist church.

Birth: July 5, 1844; Berwick, Pennsylvania

Death: July 30, 1914 (age 70);

Military Service: USA, 1861-64

Unit:  4th Illinois Cavalry, 84th Pennsylvania Volunteers

Alma Mater: Dickinson College, B.A. (Class of 1868); Dickinson College, M.A. (Class of 1871)

Jesse Bowman Young in August, 1861, at the age of seventeen, he joined his uncle, Major Samuel Millard Bowman (1815-1883) in the Fourth Illinois Cavalry and saw action with the Western Army under Grant. When Major Bowman assumed command in 1862 of the 84th Pennsylvania Volunteers - drawn largely from Blair, Lycoming, Dauphin, and Westmoreland counties - he was commissioned in the 84th's Company B. The regiment then fought with distinction in many of the most significant encounters of the war, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. When his uncle assumed command of the brigade, Young served as his aide and then became a divisional staff officer, serving in that capacity with Sickles at Gettysburg in the Peach Orchard. Jesse Young left the Army at the end of his enlistment in 1864, having risen to the rank of Captain, but was offered a colonelcy as head of a regiment of African-American volunteers. While Young was waiting for his assignment in Washington D.C., the war ended.

John Young was born on September 4, 1763 in York County, Pennsylvania. Little is known of his early life prior to his enrollment in Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As a member of the Class of 1788, Young studied under President Charles Nisbet and took fastidious notes. Because of Young's attentiveness, transcripts of Nisbet's lectures on theology, philosophy, and metaphysics survive and are housed in the College's Archives and Special Collections.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1788, Young remained at Dickinson to continue his studies in theology with Nisbet, as did several of his classmates. Although he did not earn any advanced degree, Young was licensed to preach by the Philadelphia Presbytery in 1791, and the following year he became the pastor at churches in Timber Ridge and Old Providence, Virginia. His pastorship in Virginia lasted for seven years; he relocated to Greencastle, Pennsylvania in 1799. There he preached until his death in 1803. In 1802, Young became a trustee of Dickinson College.

Young married Mary Fullerton and the couple had at least one son, John Clarke Young, who graduated from Dickinson in 1823 and went on to become president of Centre College in Kentucky. John Young died on July 24, 1803, less than a month before his son John was born.