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.

Gaylord Patterson was born in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania on August 18, 1866. He attended Allegheny College but graduated in 1888 from Ohio Wesleyan University. He then earned his Ph.D. from Yale and other degrees from the Boston University School of Theology and Harvard. He then embarked upon a fourteen year ministry in the service of the Methodist church. In 1907, he re-entered university life, teaching history, economics, and social science at Williamette University; he also served as its dean.

Patterson arrived at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1915 as a professor of economics and sociology. He was the only man to teach economics, sociology, and political science at the College when he came, but as the size of the staff increased he was able to concentrate more on his chosen field of sociology. From 1930 to the time of his retirement in 1939, he served as professor of sociology. He also was dean of the junior class from 1928 to 1930. Ill heath and weakness as a result of asthma often hampered his work at the College; in 1931 he was forced to take a temporary leave of absence. He retired in 1940 as professor emeritus of sociology.

He was married in 1900 to Millicent Louise Webber and they had a daughter, Louise, who graduated from Dickinson in 1927. Gaylord Hawkins Patterson died at the age of 74 on June 5, 1940.

Marcus Junius Parrott was born on October 29, 1828 in Hamburg, South Carolina, the son of a wealthy Quaker family. His parents left the South when he was a young boy and he grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He was prepared at the Dayton Academy, and went on to study at Ohio Wesleyan University. In December, 1847, Parrott was expelled from Ohio Wesleyan over a clash with his Greek instructor and his refusal to sign a pledge to respect that faculty member. He went on to spend his junior and senior years at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he was an active member in the Belles Lettres Society and was co-editor -- with Moncure Conway and John J. Jacob, the future governor of West Virginia -- of the pioneering student publication, the Collegian. Parrott graduated with his class in May, 1849 and moved to Boston, Massachusetts to attend the Cambridge Law School for two years. During his law school career Parrott attended many lectures at Faneuil Hall given by noted abolitionists such as Charles Sumner, George Thompson, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Frederick Douglas.

Wellington Parlin was born in Des Moines, Iowa on January 19, 1899. He graduated from Simpson College in 1921 with a bachelor of arts degree and continued at the University of Iowa where he earned his master of sciences degree in 1922. He taught at Emory University as an instructor in physics between 1923 and 1926, before attending Johns Hopkins University to earn his doctorate in 1929.

Parlin began his career at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1930 as an associate professor of physics. The College promoted him to full professor in 1934. During his time at the College, Parlin conducted research in his main interest, the properties of light. In 1935, he invented an intensitometer, a machine to give variable and known intensities of light without changing the color values. He also developed a set of color filters, which were used to determine the degree of color blindness.

In 1948, Parlin was appointed chair of the physics department. He was also a faculty advisor to the Mohler Scientific Club and the Phi Beta Kappa honorary society. In 1955, he retired from the College with the status of professor emeritus of physics.

Parlin was a veteran of both the First and Second World War. He was married and had four daughters. Wellington Amos Parlin died on September 8, 1996, at the age of 97.

Donald Parker was born in New Haven, Connecticut on June 27, 1920. He graduated from Lyman Hall High School in Wallingford in the spring of 1938. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1943 on September 21, 1939 but transferred to Wesleyan University where he graduated in 1942.

He worked a short time as an accountant until he was inducted into the U.S. Army in November, 1942. He trained at Fort Riley, Kansas and Camp Polk in Louisiana before shipping to Europe as a tank commander in August, 1944.

He joined the 19th Battalion of the Ninth Armored Division and was killed in action in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge on December 29, 1944.

Andrew Parker was born in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania on May 21, 1805. He attended local schools and entered the local Dickinson College. He graduated with the class of 1824 and studied law. Parker was admitted to the Cumberland County bar in 1826 and began practice in Lewistown, Pennsylvania. He was appointed as a deputy district attorney to Mifflin County and relocated to Mifflintown in 1831, the year in which Juniata County was carved from Mifflin County. He punctuated his long practice of law there when he was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served one term as a Democrat in the thirty-second Congress between 1851 and 1853.

Andrew Parker died in Mifflintown on January 15, 1864 at the age of fifty-eight and is buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery there.

Birth: June 29, 1811;  Baltimore, Maryland

Death: April 24, 1883 (age 72); Washington, D.C

Military Service: USN, 1834-73

Unit: USS Brandywine; USS Vincennes; Relief; USS Peacock; USS Princeton; H.M.S. Agamemnon; USS Macedonian; USS Hartford; Admiral Farragut's squadron

Alma Mater: Dickinson College, B.A. (Class of 1829); University of Marlyand, M.D. (Class of 1834)

James Croxall Palmer was one of four sons of merchant Edward Palmer and his wife Catherine Croxall Palmer. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and graduated with the class of 1829. He studied law for a time but eventually earned a medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1834. He took up a commission as an assistant surgeon in the United States Navy and by the end of 1835 had completed a voyage around the world in the frigate USS Brandywine and the sloop USS Vincennes.

Edward Ernest Palmer was born in Washington DC on November 3, 1868, the son of William G. and Mary Virginia (Webster) Palmer. The boy was named after his uncle Edward Palmer, plant collector and explorer. Young Edward was a diarist whose writing shows his early interest in all things scientific. He was often employed by his uncle to work up specimens, which were sent back from the Western United States, Central and South America. These specimens are found today in the collections at Kew Gardens and the Smithsonian, as well as other herbaria in the United States and Europe.

He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1889, with the class of 1893. As a freshman he won the Muchmore Prize and joined the Union Philosophical Society, serving as its head librarian the following year. Perhaps more significantly for his own future, Colonel Richard Pratt of the Carlisle Indian School lectured that year at the College on the "Past, Present, and Future of the Indian." He served as the president of the junior class, and anchored the champion tug-of-war team of his senior year. Significantly, under the tutelage of pioneer photographer Professor Charles Francis Himes of the Physics Department, Palmer developed his life-long interest in photography. He graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in June, 1893.

Birth: 1839; New Berlin, Union, Pennsylvania

Death: May 13, 1880 (age 38); Naval Hospital, Washington D.C.

Military Service: USA, 1862

Unit: 142nd PA Infantry

Alma Mater: Dickinson College, B.A. (Class of 1859 non-graduate); University of Lewisburg(Bucknell University), B.A, (Class of 1862)

The son of a Carlisle minister, Thomas Orwig entered the Dickinson College Grammar School at the age of 16 on September 12, 1855 where he prepared for two years before entering the College in 1855 as a member of the class of 1859. Although Orwig left Dickinson after his sophomore year when his family moved to New Berlin, Pennsylvania, while at the College he was a member of the Belles Lettres Literary Society.

Orwig received his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Lewisburg(Bucknell University) in 1862 and then joined the Union army, rising to the rank of sergeant. He died later that year in a naval hospital in Washington, D.C.

Jurgen Von Oertzen was a German student who attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1933-1934 and earned a bachelor's degree with the class of 1934 on June 11, 1934. From Mecklenburg in northern Germany, he was a student at the University of Rostock and was participating in the Institute of International Education's exchange program. The following year, William Woodward, class of 1934, brother of Paul Woodward, class of 1937, studied physics and chemistry at the university in Munich. Known as "Ekky," von Oertzen concentrated his studies in history and economics with the goal of entering the German civil service. He also participated in the varsity soccer team.

When the call for the fifteenth reunion of his class went out in 1949, relatives sent information that on August 21, 1941, Jurgen von Oertzen had been killed in action serving in the German Army during the battle for the Latvian capital of Riga. Latvia had been independent until 1940 when it came under Soviet domination; the German attack was part of the general advance in Hitler's invasion of Russia.

He had married his wife Elizabeth before the war broke out and she and their son and daughter survived the war and lived in western Germany. Unlike other Dickinsonian casualties of the Second World War, von Oertzen does not appear on the plaque in Memorial Hall.