Washington Lafayette Elliott was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on March 31, 1825. He was the son of Commodore Jesse Duncan Elliott, USN.  Before he reached his teens, young Washington accompanied his father on cruises with the West Indies Squadron and on board the USS Constitution, which his father commanded in the Mediterranean for a time.  For several years, Commodore Elliott was also a trustee of Dickinson College. The younger Elliott was enrolled in the Grammar School there in 1838, then completed two years as an undergraduate with the class of 1843.

Samuel Dickinson Hillman was born to Samuel and Susan Dickinson Hillman of Blackwood, New Jersey, on January 18, 1825. Not much is known of his life before he entered the Dickinson College Grammar School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1845.  A member of the Belles Lettres Literary Society, Hillman graduated from the College in 1850, and received his master's degree two years later. While working towards this degree, he taught in West Chester, Pennsylvania from 1850 to 1851. Hillman was then appointed principal of the Grammar School, an office he would occupy for nine years.

Jesse Truesdell Peck, the youngest of ten children of Luther Peck, was born on April 4, 1811 on a farm in Middlefield, Otsego County, New York.  He was educated at Cazenovia Seminary and became a minister in the Methodist Church.  He married Persis Wing on October 13, 1831, and in the following year he joined the Oneida Conference.  In 1837, Peck became the head of the Gouverneur Wesleyan Seminary in New York.