John Ell spent four years at the College after graduating from high school in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. He worked on the Dickinsonian, and was a photography editor of the Microcosm. He was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma, pledging with John Cockey, and served as president of the Catholic Club and of the Belles Lettres Society. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was the recipient of the Patton Prize for 1940.

Ell entered the Army in August 1941 and soon after volunteered for the newly-formed parachute infantry units. He was commissioned at Fort Benning, Georgia in January 1943 and a year later was posted in England. On D-Day, 1944, his regiment, the 501st of the 101st Airborne Division, landed in Normandy before dawn. Ell was later wounded but returned to his unit in time for the airborne assault into Holland to seize the Rhine bridges. On September 18, 1944, his platoon was ordered to defend newly-seized positions against an enemy counter-attack. While leading this defense against superior forces, John Ell was killed by mortar fire. For this action, he was awarded the Bronze Star posthumously; he was twenty-six. Prior to his death, Ell sent an eloquent letter to his parents from Normandy, trying to prepare them for the possibility that he may not return.

Ninian Edwards was born in Montgomery County, Maryland on March 17, 1775 to Benjamin and Margaret Edwards, a well-connected political family. He attended Dickinson with the class of 1792 but left before the completion of his degree and took up the study of law.

In 1795 he was in Kentucky, managing family property there and entering state politics with immediate success. He was elected to the legislature before he was eligible to vote. In 1803, he was appointed to the bench and four years later became the chief justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

In 1809, James Madison appointed Edwards as the first governor of the newly-formed Illinois Territory. He served in the formative years of government for the territory, forming the political structure which would accompany statehood in 1818. He became the new state's senator in 1819. He resigned in 1824 upon his appointment by President Monroe as minister to Mexico; however, he was never able to assume the post due to a scandal stemming from a public argument with the current secretary of the Treasury. Edwards returned to Illinois where he was elected governor in 1826. His popularity waned and he did not seek re-election in 1830. His career ended with defeat in a run for Congress in 1832.

William Wilcox Edel was born on March 16, 1894 in Baltimore, Maryland. His mother was Annie Wilcox, and his father was John Wesley Edel, a prosperous dairy retailer. Edel attended high school at Baltimore City College and then entered Dickinson College, where he graduated in three years as a Phi Beta Kappa member of the class of 1915. While an undergraduate, Edel became a member of the Belles Lettres Literary Society and the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity. He also contributed illustrations to the 1915 Microcosm.

After graduation, Edel and six other members of the class of 1915 enrolled in the School of Theology at Boston University. Edel graduated from that institution in 1918. The outbreak of war caused him to enlist as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy on July 11, 1917. During his thirty-year career, Edel saw service at sea in the Atlantic, served as superintendent of education in American Samoa, and was area chaplain for the South Pacific during the Second World War. In 1935, he received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from his alma mater. Ten years later, Edel was nearing retirement as a captain, the highest rank then open to a naval chaplain. The Dickinson board of trustees, having been unable to secure other earlier choices, turned to Edel on June 7, 1946 and elected him as the twenty-second president of the College.

Milton Walker Eddy was born in 1884 in India, at Calcutta, to American parents. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1910 and obtained his Ph.D., from the University of Pennsylvania in 1918. He became an instructor in zoology at the Pennsylvania State College in 1910 and was promoted to professor in 1913. He left in 1918 to become an assistant chief chemist for the United States Ammonium Nitrate Plant in Perryville, Maryland. Also, as part of the war effort, he served as a bacteriologist at the Ordinance Department of the United States Army. Continuing a career with the government, Eddy was a scientific assistant at the United States Public Health Service.

Eddy joined the Dickinson College faculty in 1921 as full professor of biology and chair of the department, replacing the late Professor Stephens. A leader in and out of the classroom for thirty-four years, Eddy was a supporter of James Henry Morgan against President Waugh. While teaching at Dickinson, he attended the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania for further postgraduate work. Much of Eddy's time went into researching the microphotography of hair. His research helped the police in criminal investigations, most famously the "Babes in the Wood" case of 1934 that established him as the recognized authority on the identification of persons by hair specimens. After a successful career in teaching and research, Eddy retired in 1955.

Robert N. Earhart was born in Blairsville, Pennsylvania on April 9, 1833 to merchant David Earhart and his wife, Catharine Altman Earhart. His father took his large family, of which Robert was the youngest, to Pleasant Valley, Iowa during the 1840s. The younger Earhart received his preparatory education at Alexander College, a Presbyterian institution in Dubuque, Iowa that closed in 1857. He then returned to his native state for his undergraduate degree, enrolling at Dickinson College in Carlisle in the autumn of 1854. Earhart was elected to the Belles Lettres Society and graduated with his class in 1858.

Earhart then attended the B.D. Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston, Illinois and qualified in 1860 as a clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He returned to his home area in Iowa and joined the Upper Iowa Conference of that church, where he served congregations for the remainder of his active life. His pastorates included churches at Toledo in Tuma County, at Osage in Mitchell County, and at the First Methodist of Manchester in Delaware County. After forty-one years of service to northern Iowa, he retired from the pulpit in 1901.

Joseph Dysart was born on July 8, 1820 on the family farm, Eden Hill, in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, one of three sons of James and Jane Dysart. His family hired a tutor who introduced him to the classics and then he attended the early public schools of the county. When nineteen, he traveled to Iowa for the land sales that were expected in October 1839. When these sales were postponed he and a friend returned home on foot, covering an average of forty miles a day. Soon after, he entered Dickinson's Preparatory School and then the College in the class of 1845. He was an exemplary student, was elected as a member of the Union Philosophical Society, and on graduation with his class gave the valedictory speech. Following his degree, he became principal of the Hillsboro Male Academy on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Falling ill, he left Hillsboro in 1847 and took up teaching in Mississippi, first as a private tutor and than as principal of the Aberdeen Male Academy in Aberdeen, Mississippi between 1851 and 1853. In his spare time, he studied law and passed the Mississippi bar. He then traveled to Lee County in Illinois where he owned land and took up farming. Selling up to the railroad at a healthy profit, he moved on once again in April 1856 to the town of Vinton in Benton County, Iowa.

Birth: June 29, 1837; Upper Tract, Pendleton County, West Virginia

Death: December 3, 1861 (age 24); Allegheny Mountain

 Military Service: CSA, 1861

 Unit: 25th Infantry Regiment Virginia

Alma Mater: Dickinson College, B.A. (Class of 1859)

Zebulon Dyer while attending Dickinson was a member of the Union Philosophical Society and Phi Kappa Sigma; he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1859. Until the outbreak of the Civil War, he spent the next two years teaching and studying law.

Dyer enlisted as a Sergeant in Company H, 25th Infantry Regiment Virginia of the Confederate States Army.  He died from wounds at the Allegheny Mountain on December 13, 1861. He was twenty-four years old.

John Price Durbin was born on October 10, 1800 in Bourbon County, Kentucky, the eldest of five sons. Shortly after his father died, he was apprenticed to a cabinet maker at the age of 13; he worked for several years until his religious conversion at age 18. Through tutors and self-education, he began to study English grammar, and later Latin and Greek. Durbin soon became a licensed preacher and in 1819 traveled to Ohio to enter the ministry. In 1821 he began to minister in Hamilton, Ohio, and at the same time took up studies at nearby Miami University. The following year he moved again and was forced to continue his studies independently. Durbin resumed formal studies at Cincinnati College and received both a bachelor's and a master's of arts degree in 1825. Immediately following his graduation, he became a professor of languages at Augusta College in Kentucky. He married Frances B. Cook of Philadelphia on September 6, 1827, and in 1831 was elected Chaplain of the United States Senate. This appointment was followed in 1832 with a position as editor of the Christian Advocate.

Stephen Duncan was born in 1729 and came to prominence in Cumberland County with a successful law practice and a thriving business as a merchant. By 1780, he was noted in county tax records as the heaviest taxpayer in the county.

He also served as Treasurer of Cumberland County until he resigned to take a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, from 1780 to 1783. At the founding of Dickinson College, of which he was a charter trustee, he took upon himself the unofficial task of college treasurer. Duncan served as a trustee of the College until his death.

He married Ann Fox (1732-1796) and the couple had nine children, including Robert Duncan. Several of their offspring married into prominent Carlisle families. Stephen Duncan died in Carlisle on March 30, 1794. His wife followed him that December.

Robert Duncan was born c1768, the son of Carlisle attorney Stephen Duncan. The elder Duncan was a founding trustee of both the Carlisle Grammar School and Dickinson College; Robert presumably attended the grammar school before enrolling in Dickinson College. As a member of the first graduating class of the College, Duncan delivered the first valedictory address at Commencement on September 26, 1787. This speech was transcribed by fellow Dickinsonian John Young of the Class of 1788.

After graduation, Duncan studied law, most likely with his father, and had been admitted to the bar in Cumberland County by 1790. His brother, Thomas, was a very successful attorney as well, and in June 1804, the two of them purchased one-half of the Kittanning Manor in Armstrong County. The Duncans paid $8,000 for their 2300 acres. Soon after, Robert moved his family to the estate, which had been renamed Appleby. When Robert Duncan died on April 5, 1807 at the age of 39, he left his half of the lands to his wife Ellen (Ellenor) and their daughter Mary.