Dauphin Osgood Thompson, brother of William and also a neighbor of the Browns at North Elba, was born April 17, 1838, and was killed in the engine house on October 18, 1859. He was the brother of William Thompson, who also fell, and of Henry Thompson, Their sister Isabella married Watson Brown. Dauphin Thompson was a handsome, inexperienced, country boy, “more like a girl than a warrior,” and “diffident and quiet.”

Nearly all the laboring class around Christiana at that time were negroes, many of whom had formerly been slaves. Some of these were occasionally betrayed and informed upon by persons who received a pecuniary reward for the same, kidnapped, and carried back, bound or hand-cuffed, to their masters.

William Thompson, son of Roswell Thompson, was born in August, 1833, and was killed October 17, 1859. He married Mary Ann brown, a neighbor, but no relation of the Brown family. He had no hesitation as to where his duty lay when the call came to help free the slaves. He started for Kansas in 1856, but turned back on meeting the Brown sons, who returned to North Elba in the fall of that year. He was full of fun and good nature, and bore himself unflinchingly when face to face with death.

Christiana, Lancaster County, Penn., Sept., 1851. Edward Gorsuch, (represented as a very pious member of a Methodist Church in Baltimore!) with his son Dickinson, accompanied by the Sheriff of Lancaster County, Penn., and by a Philadelphia officer named Henry Kline, went to Christiana to arrest certain slaves of his, who (as he had been privately informed by a wretch named Wm. M. Padgett) were living there.

Dickerson [Dickinson] fell wounded. He arose and was shot again. The old man, after fighting valiantly, was killed. The others of the slaveholders with the United States Marshal and his aids fled, pursued by the negroes. While Dickerson [Dickinson] lay bleeding in the edge of the woods, Joseph P. Scarlett, a Quaker, came up and protected him from the infuriated negroes, who pressed forward to take his life. One was in the act of shooting, when Joseph pushed him aside, saying: "Don't kill him."…

The Catalyst for violence, the lightning bolt that started the riotous blaze, was a confrontation between Gorsuch and the man known in freedom as Samuel Thompson, one of the fugitives from his farm.  Both men were angry by the time that Parker overheard part of their verbal exchange:  "Old man, you had better go home to Maryland," said Samuel.

On the 15th of September [1851], a meeting of some five or six thousand persons was held in Monument square to give an expression of the sentiments and feelings of Baltimoreans relative to the recent outrage and murder at Christiana, Pennsylvania. The meeting was organized by Hon. John H. T. Jerome, president, with a large number of vice-presidents and secretaries. Messrs. Z. Collins Lee, Coleman Yellott, Francis Gallagher, Samuel H. Tagart, and Col. George W. Hughes eloquently addressed the meeting.