Eugene Allen Noble (1865-1948)

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.

The board of trustees of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania unanimously elected Noble as their new president following the resignation of President George Reed in 1911. He assumed the office as the 16th president of the College on September 1, 1911. He inherited an administration in dire financial straits and, despite his efforts over the next three years, the situation did not improve. With attendance down and financial support waning, President Noble was pressured into submitting his resignation to the board on May 8, 1914, to become effective one week later. He was then replaced with the dean of the College, James Henry Morgan.

Following his years at Dickinson, Noble went on to become the executive secretary of the Julliard Musical Foundation in 1920. After the death of his wife Lillian, he married Mrs. Therese K. Lownes. At the time of his death on June 28, 1948 at the age of 83, he was survived by daughter Beatrice E. and son Francis O. as well as four grandchildren. In the spring of 1955, his widow Therese loaned a personal collection of fifty etchings to Dickinson College for an exhibit in memory of her husband.