On Thursday afternoon we left for New York State and a family wedding. We made it as far as Erie, Pennsylvania. The next morning we headed off the rest of the way to our destination, Skaneateles, New York. While the weather could have been a bit sunnier and the leaves a bit more colorful, we were indeed happy to be together for a little while.
I first heard of Skaneateles in high school when I told one of my teachers that I was going to Syracuse University. He was a Saint Bonaventure alumnus and told me to make sure I made it to Skaneateles and Cazenovia during my years in Syracuse. I followed his advice. In later years when our daughter was in grad school, we made it a point to visit these villages and share a meal at the Sherwood Inn in Skaneateles. When we realized our niece’s wedding would take place closer to Skaneateles than Syracuse, we remembered the lake houses available for rent. It was wonderful to be able to spend some time with my husband’s mom, sisters and their families.
The water in Lake Skaneateles is clearer than any lake I’ve ever seen. If you ever visit Skaneateles you can walk on the public pier and see for yourself. When I posted the picture below to Facebook, a friend said:
I went sailing on Skaneateles a couple of times with a sorority sister and it was the clearest water I’d ever seen, even at 8-10 feet deep.
The water off the dock at the lake house. I suspect it is at least two feet deep there.
Sad to say, there wasn’t very much time to do anything other than attend the wedding. No side trip to Syracuse to see Phi Delta Theta letters on my Pi Phi house. No chance to take pictures of favorite sites. We did manage a lunch at the Sherwood Inn before the Connecticut and Maryland contingents arrived.
To make this more than a Becque family travelogue, I offer this excerpt from a history of higher education course pack I wrote with my dissertation advisor.
Union College in Schenectady, New York, is called the birthplace of the American fraternity system. It was there that the founding of the three “Union Triad” fraternities: Kappa Alpha Society (1825), Sigma Phi (1827), and Delta Phi (1827) became the model for the American fraternity system.
Prior to the emergence of the fraternity system, debating clubs and literary societies provided extracurricular activities for the students. Most schools had two societies and the membership of both clubs roughly equaled the number of students enrolled. The societies had grand sounding names, Adelphian, Diognothian, Alexandrian, Socratic and Zetetic, to name just a few.
The societies provided educational and social opportunities outside of the oftentimes monotonous recitations and class work. The literary societies were noted for their extensive libraries whose collections sometimes outnumbered the college’s volumes.
The rise of the fraternities, or Greek letter societies as they are also known, heralded the descent of the debating and literary societies.Phi Beta Kappa was founded in Williamsburg, Virginia, at the College of William and Mary in 1776. Although Phi Beta Kappa is now a scholastic honorary, it was at the time of its founding similar to the present day fraternity. By 1825 when Kappa Alpha Society was founded at Union College, the five chapters of Phi Beta Kappa already had become scholastic honoraries.
Other men’s national fraternities were founded prior to the Civil War. The war, however, put a damper on fraternity activities and expansion. After the war, several fraternities were founded in southern colleges and they expanded throughout the south. One southern fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega, was founded at Virginia Military Institute with the prime objective being to “restore the Union by uniting fraternally the young men of the South with those of the North” (Anson & Marchesani, 1991, p. III-20).
New York State is also home to the Syracuse Triad, the three women’s organizations founded at Syracuse – Alpha Phi, Gamma Phi Beta, and Alpha Gamma Delta. For a post about them, see http://wp.me/p20I1i-6h.
Sunrise on the lake before we left on the 13-hour ride home.
(c) Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2014. All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/
For Marvin Hamlisch 
