My Genealogy Hound

WILLIAM TRICKETT, LL. D., was born June 9, 1840, in Leicester, the capital of Leicestershire, in the heart of England. While he was only in his second year his parents removed to the United States, and settled in Philadelphia, where the son was brought up attending the primary, secondary and grammar schools, and finally at thirteen, entering the Central high school, from which he graduated in his seventeenth year. When eighteen and a half years of age he became attached to the Philadelphia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and for five or six years preached at various points in the States of Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania. His health failing about this time he found it necessary to adopt some other avocation, and, relinquishing preaching, he entered upon a course in Dickinson College, from which institution he graduated in 1868, remaining for one year after his graduation as principal of its preparatory school. In the summer of 1869 he was elected an adjunct professor of Philosophy in Dickinson College, a position he held for two years. In 1871 he went to Europe, where he remained for sixteen months, traveling and studying in Germany, Switzerland and France. While thus engaged in Europe he was elected Professor in Dickinson College, which place he accepted on his return, in 1872, and filled until the fall of 1874, when he resigned it and took up the study of law. He prepared for the law at Carlisle, and was admitted to the Cumberland County Bar in 1875, and to practice in the Supreme Court in 1877. A few years after entering upon the practice of his profession Mr. Trickett turned his attention to the writing of law books, at which he has kept assiduously ever since, and in which line he has won great distinction. In 1881 he produced in two volumes the Law of Liens in Pennsylvania, and in 1891 an additional volume on the same subject; in 1884 the Law of Limitation and the Law of Assignments; in 1893, the Law of Boroughs, to which he added a supplementary volume in 1898; in 1894, the Law of Highways; in 1900 the Law of Guardians and the Law of Partition; in 1901, the Law of Witnesses; and in 1904, the Law of Landlord and Tenant, and at present he is engaged on several other important works.

Mr. Trickett never sought office, but in 1891 he was elected to a Constitutional Convention, which convention, however, did not meet. In 1898 he was one of the Democratic nominees for Superior Court Judge and received 412,580 votes, while his colleagues on the ticket received an average of 353,117. His favorite studies in his earlier years were theology and philosophy; in later years, law, sociology and politics in the Aristotelian sense. He is a member of the American Bar Association; of the Pennsylvania Bar Association; and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; in 1890 DePauw University conferred upon him the degree of LL. D.

In 1890 Dr. Trickett was elected dean of the Dickinson Law School, which had then just been incorporated to continue the work of an earlier school originated by Hon. John Reed, a former president judge of the Courts of Cumberland county. He has been dean continuously ever since, a period of thirteen years, during which time 300 lawyers have been trained in the school, who are now practicing their profession in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and other States. Besides the oversight of the school he has, during his incumbency, given lectures several hours daily on the law of Real Property, Contracts, Evidence, Decedent’s Estates, Bills and Notes, Corporations and Constitutional Law. During the first year of the school under its charter he did all the teaching that was done. The school has, during the fourteen years, reached a maximum of over 100 full students, besides students of the College who have taken a practical law course.