Grace Coolidge and Orange, Connecticut

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Orange, Connecticut is a small town, west of New Haven. It’s where my husband grew up and where we visit yearly. When I found a Grace Coolidge letter written from Orange, my curiosity was piqued. Did Grace Coolidge really spend time in Orange, a town I know so well? As it turns out, yes she did!

The Coolidge’s son John and his young family, Grace Coolidge’s “precious four” as she referred to them, did indeed live in Orange. John Coolidge, in 1925, as an Amherst College Phi Gamma Delta, met Florence Trumbull, a Mount Holyoke student and daughter of the Governor of Connecticut, as they traveled on a train to the inauguration festivities in Washington.

The Wedding Party of John and Florence Trumbull Coolidge

On September 23, 1929, Florence and John married in Plainville, Connecticut. “As the couple gave their vows in a simple, seven minute ceremony, Professor William C. Hammond, of Mount Holyoke College, the bride’s alma mater, softly played ‘White’s Air,’ the college vesper song, as an obligato on the organ.”[1] More than a thousand mums were transported by refrigerated rail car from California to be used in the wedding. Thousands lined the streets to “view the wedding which began as a charming boy and girl romance and soon became an event of nation-wide interest second only in social importance this year to the Lindbergh-Morrow wedding last May.”[2]

Grace wrote her son a letter just before he married, “John, you are a son for a mother to be proud of and I want you to always feel that I am standing by, ready to do anything for you and Florence. You two together should make something beautiful of your lives. Just don’t let little things be-cloud your vision and, when the rough places need to be gotten over, hold your chin up, throw your shoulders back and go forward–for it’s the rough places which steady the feet and strengthen the muscles. Life is so beautiful–never do anything which will mar the sweetness of it. My, how I love you and how I want you to find in life all that is just and true and right and live it gloriously!”[3]

After they first married, the couple lived for a time in Westville, Connecticut. John had taken a job with the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. In 1933, their first child, Cynthia, was born. Her initials, “C.C,” mirrored the President’s initials. Daughter Lydia was born in 1939.  At some point during John’s 13-year-long employment with the railroad, the Coolidges moved to Orange.

When I located the Round Robin letter written from Orange, where the former First Lady was babysitting her granddaughters, I called my mother-in-law and asked her to do some sleuthing. I wanted to know which house it was. She could find no leads. That summer, the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation hosted a Grace Coolidge Day in Northampton, Massachusetts. My mother-in-law, daughter, and I attended. The Coolidge’s granddaughter, Lydia Coolidge Sayles, was on the program. We spoke with her and she told us exactly where the house was located. When we arrived back in Orange, we found the house and we chatted with a neighbor who had been friends with the Coolidge girls. She remembered the First Lady arriving at the home and  playing jacks on the floor with the girls.

[1] St. Petersburg Times, September 24, 1929.
[2] St. Petersburg Times, September 24, 1929.
[3] Sayles, Lydia Coolidge, Grace Coolidge, My Grandmother, 1998.

 

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Jake Stahl, Sigma Chi, Outstanding Illini Athlete of the Early 1900s

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

 

Garland “Jake” Stahl

Garland “Jake” Stahl was perhaps the most famous of the University of Illinois’ early athletes. He was the captain of the 1902 Illini football team as well as a star on the baseball team. A member of the Kappa Kappa Chapter of Sigma Chi, his nickname “Jake” was given to him by a chapter member.

At Homecoming 1922, shortly after his death, the chapter’s alumni reminisced about their departed brother. One told the story of his nickname, “Garland Stahl came over from Elkhart (Illinois), and he was as green a country boy as they make ‘em. In his freshman year he joined the Sigma Chi Fraternity, and as he played the cornet, he was immediately made a member of the house orchestra. One night a special feature at the house was to be an orchestra program, but when the time came to begin, Stahl was nowhere to be found. The fellows searched the house and finally found him hiding away on the second floor. They dragged him down and asked him what the trouble was. ‘Aw, I ain’t got no lip,’ said Stahl, and he started to walk away, when Jack Allen, 1902, one of the musicians, stopped him with, ‘Come on, ya darn old hay jake, and play anyway.’ Stahl played, but from that time on everyone who had heard the affair called him ‘Jake’ until it just grew into his name.” (The Sigma Chi Quarterly, November 1922, 42(1), p. 62).

At a home game with Michigan in 1903, Stahl hit  a game-winning homer “so hard and so high that it struck amid the upper limbs of a tree almost down to the football field.” The soft maple tree became known as the “Jake Stahl Tree” until the late 1940s when it was cut down because of advanced decay.

In 1903, after graduating, Stahl joined the Boston Red Sox as a first baseman. Later he was transferred to Washington, Chicago, New York and then back to Washington as player- manager. He went back to the Red Sox as manager.

In 1906, he married Jennie Mahan, a classmate and a member of the Delta Chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta at the University of Illinois. Her father was founder and president of the Washington Park National Bank in Chicago. In the off-season, Stahl worked for the bank. Later he became the bank’s president but his health failed. The family moved to the West Coast in an unsuccessful effort to regain his health. He died on September 18, 1922. At his interment in Chicago, his Sigma Chi chapter placed on his grave a large white cross of Sigma Chi roses. Stahl had been a loyal Kappa Kappa alumnus, donating generously to the building fund and giving the chapter a Victrola.

 

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Happy Birthday Alpha Delta Pi!

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Alpha Delta Pi was founded as the Adelphean Society on May 15, 1851 at Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia. In 1905, the Society changed its name to Alpha Delta Phi. With the installation of its Beta Chapter at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Alpha Delta Phi became a national organization.

The third chapter was founded at Mary Baldwin Seminary, in Staunton, Virginia, in 1906, the same year that Macon, Georgia was the site of its first national convention. Alpha Delta Phi joined the National Panhellenic Conference in 1909.

The installation of the Sigma Chapter at the University of Illinois in 1912 came shortly after the installation, on the same campus, of the Illinois Chapter of Alpha Delta Phi, a men’s fraternity whose chapters were primarily in the northeast. Alpha Delta Phi, the men’s fraternity, was founded in 1832 at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. The women made their organization aware of this duplication of name and the problems that surfaced because of it. In 1913, the convention body voted to change the name  to Alpha Delta Pi.

Wesleyan Female College

Alpha Delta Pi, along with Phi Mu, are the two “Macon Magnolias.” On January 4, 1852, Phi Mu, was founded as the Philomathean Society on the same campus. For a little more than 50 years they remained together on the campus. They made their debuts into the Panhellenic world at about the same time. They are the oldest of the secret societies for women.

 

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Before 210 Walnut Place – New York Alpha’s Euclid House

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

215 Euclid

I just came across this postcard of the house that the New York Alphas lived in from 1920-39. This seems to have been on Euclid between Comstock and Ostrom. My guess is that it was on a lot that Shaw Hall is now on.

To read more about the houses that Pi Beta Phi’s New York Alpha Chapter has lived in, please visit http://wp.me/p20I1i-86 or click the link on the sidebar.

 

 

 

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There Are No Alumni of Women’s Colleges or Women’s Fraternities/Sororities

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

“Once a Student, Always an Alumna” reads an ad on the back of the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, one of my favorite college magazines. Mount Holyoke College is a women’s college. It has only graduated women since its founding in 1837. Therefore,  it does not have alumni. They are alumnae. The same can be said of Pi Phi or any women’s fraternity/sorority. They are women’s organizations. After graduation or withdrawal from college, one of their members is an alumna, two or more are alumnae. That is, unless there are one or more men in the membership.*

To explain why I cringe whenever I hear a fraternity woman talk about her chapter’s alumni, I am quoting Mary Lou Leslie who, many years ago, wrote this “Alumn-knee” explanation in The Angelos of Kappa Delta, “The men of the Greek World use their EYES to see the KNEES of the women of the Greek World. That’s an over-simplified way of remembering masculine and feminine Latin endings – a man is an alumnNUS of a college or fraternity and a woman is an alumnA. Are you with me so far? Then when we gather in associations or conventions, it is still a different story. Two, three or several hundred, the men are alumnI and the women are alumnAE.  Now here’s the rub ‘I’ is just plain ‘I’ or ‘EYE’. ‘AE’ is NOT pronounced ‘I’ or ‘EYE’ but ‘EEE’ – long ‘E'”.

*Delta Gamma’s early growth was due, in part, to the efforts of Phi Delta Theta George Banta. He is the only male initiate of Delta Gamma. While it is an interesting footnote to note that the group has one male member, the Delta Gammas who have graduated or withdrawn from college are called alumnae, as noted on the Delta Gamma web-site, and well they should be.

 

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How the P.E.O.s at Iowa Wesleyan Became Alpha Xi Deltas

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

How exactly did those P.E.O.s at Iowa Wesleyan College become the Beta Chapter of Alpha Xi Delta? How was that connection made? It was such a defining moment in the history of both organizations.

P.E.O. was founded as a collegiate organization at Iowa Wesleyan College on January 21, 1869. Alpha Xi Delta was founded on April 17, 1893 at Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois.

Over the years between 1869 and 1902, the P.E.O. members who had been initiated while enrolled at Iowa Wesleyan College stayed active in the college chapter even though they were no longer enrolled in the college. Many remained in or near Mount Pleasant. Others formed chapters in towns and communities where they  moved after graduation. The early P.E.O. chapters that had been formed at nearby schools did not survive and P.E.O.’s growth was in community chapters. The chapter at Iowa Wesleyan College was finding it difficult to operate on a college campus with the rules put forth by the community chapters.

The P.E.O. Chapter at Iowa Wesleyan College had been known as Original Chapter A. It later took on the name A-J to distinguish itself from the Mount Pleasant chapter. It ultimately became known as Chapter S. After the turn of the century, the governing body of P.E.O. made the decision to withdraw the charter of Chapter S. The college co-eds wished to remain a collegiate organization and discussed becoming a chapter of a Greek-letter organization.

The Alpha Xi Delta Chapter at Lombard, having made the decision to become a national organization, and the collegiate members of P.E.O., having decided to become a chapter of a Greek-letter organization, discussed the decisions that needed to be made on both sides if there was to be a resolution to these wishes.

Anna Gillis (Kimble), a member of the Alpha Xi Delta Chapter at Lombard College, hailed from Mount Pleasant. Her influence helped the Iowa Wesleyan women make the decision to become the Beta Chapter of Alpha Xi Delta.

On June 9, 1902, the Alpha Xi Delta members entered the Lombard College Chapel wearing their tri-colored ribbons for the first time. The ribbons heralded the fact that they were now a national organization. After chapel, the installing officers made their way to Mount Pleasant.

The installation of Alpha Xi Delta’s second chapter took place at the home of Ellen Ball. Cora Bollinger-Block presided at the installation. Helping her were Ella Boston-Leib*, Alice Barlett-Bruner, Jennie Marriot-Buchanan, Virginia Henney Franklin, Anna Gillis (Kimble), and Edna Epperson-Brinkham.

The Beta Chapter of Alpha Xi Delta, 1904

The chapter roll quickly grew. By 1905, when the Beta Chapter hosted the Third National Convention, there were nine chapters. In addition to the chapters at Lombard and Iowa Wesleyan, chapters had been chartered at Mount Union College,  Bethany College, University of South Dakota, Wittenberg University, Syracuse University, University of Wisconsin and West Virginia University.

In 1913, Iowa Wesleyan College authorities allowed the chapter to initiate the P.E.O. alumnae as Alpha Xi Deltas. Afterwards, the Mount Pleasant Alumnae Club of Alpha Xi Delta was formed.

The only P.E.O. founder to be continuously involved with P.E.O. was Alice Bird Babb. Her daughter Alice Babb was a member of the Beta Chapter of Alpha Xi Delta.

The 1923 Alpha Xi Delta history describes one of Beta Chapter’s special traditions, “Each commencement morning the member of Beta Chapter arise with the sun and go down the ‘K’ line to an old stone quarry. Here a great fire is built, the coffee pot put on, weanies roasted, eggs fried, and an outdoor breakfast prepared. After the breakfast is eaten, the girls gather round the embers of their dying fire and sing the songs of their fraternity until it is time for the seniors to return to the university and receive the degrees which transform them from college into alumnae members.”

Anna Gillis-Kimble was the first Alpha Xi Delta delegate to attend the Inter-Sorority Conference (now known as the National Panhellenic Conference) in 1904. She served as the first Editor of The Alpha Xi Delta of the Alpha Xi Delta Sorority (now The Quill). Years later, she said, “Perhaps the dearest memory of all is in conjunction with our first journal…to have that first tiny Convention say, ‘We will have a national journal, and you and you and you may lay your heads together and produce it for us.’  That was thrilling and never to be forgotten.” Her role in making Alpha Xi Delta a national organization was only one of her contributions to her beloved sorority.

* Ella Boston Leib also served as Alpha Xi Delta’s Grand President, National Panhellenic Conference delegate, and Chairman of  NPC as well as the President of Illinois State Chapter of P.E.O. For more information about this, please take a look at this post http://wp.me/p20I1i-Gz .

 © Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2015. 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/

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Alice Duer Miller, Suffragist and Kappa Kappa Gamma

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Kappa Kappa Gamma, Beta Epsilon Chapter, Barnard College. Alice Duer is in the middle row, third from left.

Alice Duer Miller had a very privileged upbringing, but her family’s fortunes turned at about the time she entered college. Even though she was on a limited budget, she became a member of the Beta Epsilon Chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma while a student at Barnard College. A Phi Beta Kappa, she graduated in 1899 and did graduate work in mathematics at Columbia University.

She married Henry Wise Miller in October 1899. After a stint in Costa Rica where her husband worked unsuccessfully trying to cultivate rubber, they, along with their young son, returned to New York City. During this time, the Millers struggled a bit financially and she worked as a teacher while he built his business working in the Stock Exchange.

An ardent suffragist, in the years when women were trying to gain the right to vote, she wrote a column,  Are Women People? devoted to the cause of equal suffrage. In 1915 she penned:

“Mother, what is a feminist?”

“A feminist, my daughter,

Is any woman now who cares

to think about her own affairs

As men don’t think she oughter.”

Alice Duer Miller, Kappa Kappa Gamma

Another entry, Why We Oppose Votes for Men, included these pertinent points:

1. Because man’s place in the armory.

2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.

3. Because if men should adapt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.

4, Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.

5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions show this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarity unfit for the task of government.

Barnard College, the women’s college that was the coordinate to the then all-male Columbia University, was founded in 1889.* It is one of the Seven Sister Colleges. Barnard College remained a part of Miller’s life. She served as a Barnard trustee from 1922-1942 and she co-authored the 1939 history, Barnard College: The First Fifty Years.

Miller played an integral role in the Panhellenic House, the fraternity women’s residence hotel that was built in the 1920s (see the links on the sidebar for more information about it). She headed the women’s committee that sold stock in the Panhellenic House. Later in 1935, she was a judge in the Panhellenic Essay contest whose prize was week’s stay at the Beekman Tower (Panhellenic) Hotel and $50.

In addition to short stories, Miller wrote poetry, screenplays and novels. Her columns were published as Are Women People? and Women are People!  A novel, Come Out of the Kitchen, was published in 1916.  Her fiction was often adapted to stage and film. Her poem, the White Cliffs of Dover was adapted into a film. She took on the role of an actress when she appeared in Soak the Rich. She was listed as an “advisory editor” in the first issue of The New Yorker.  She died in 1942.

*The short-lived women’s fraternity system at Barnard will be chronicled in a later post. Virginia Gildersleeve, who is seated next to Miller in the picture above, played a major role, whether willingly or unwillingly, in the demise of the women’s fraternity system at Barnard College. Two National Panhellenic Conference organizations, Alpha Omicron Pi (1897) and Alpha Epsilon Phi (1909), were founded there.

 

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College Pennants, Knox College, Grace Coolidge, Baseball, Lloyd G. Balfour and Culver Military Academy, Oh My!

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Knox College Co-eds in 1908 at Whiting Hall

This photograph is so typical of the rooms in which college co-eds lived and played during the early 1900s. The pennants from other colleges and schools were standard decorations. A look through any woman’s fraternity magazine from that time period will likely yield one or two photos similar to the one above.

After all, inter-collegiate sport competitions began in the late 1800s and by the early 1900s school rivalries were common. The women above, members of the Illinois Delta Chapter of Pi Beta Phi at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, had the opportunity to watch one of the oldest intercollegiate rivalries. Yearly beginning in 1888, Knox College and nearby Monmouth College have battled for the Bronze Turkey Trophy.

In a July 1901 Arrow, the Corresponding Secretary for Vermont Beta, Grace Goodhue [Coolidge], wrote “During the last week there has been a tennis tournament here with Dartmouth, in which we won, and if our baseball had only been a little more successful we should be feeling in pretty good spirits. We wish to say to our Syracuse sisters that it is now our turn to offer congratulations to them and we do so most heartily, but with a rather forced smile.” (For the record, I date Mrs. Coolidge’s love of baseball to her college days. Few other Pi Beta Phi Corresponding Secretaries of that era included information about collegiate sports in their chapter reports.)

The pennant that intrigued me the most in this photo is the Culver one on the right side. The first time I heard of Culver was when I was researching the history of the Kappa Kappa Chapter of Sigma Chi at the University of Illinois. In leafing through the Sigma Chi magazine, I remembered seeing a picture of Lloyd G. Balfour (who would later be named a Significant Sig) with cadets on the Culver lawn. Culver Military Academy, established in 1894 in Culver, Indiana, may have been one of his early class ring accounts.

When I began my current paid employment, one of the Board members spoke about Culver and having to go to a meeting there. It turns out she served as a Board member at the Culver Academies. When I found this photo in the Knox College Archives, I immediately saw the Culver pennant. I also am aware that there is a college in Missouri called Culver-Stockton. I wasn’t sure whose pennant this was. As it turns out, Culver-Stockton did not acquire that name until after this picture was taken. And a quick google search showed me that the Culver logo hasn’t changed at all and it is the same one as on the pennant. Culver Military Academy is basically a high school. I cannot locate information about it having been a post-secondary institution back in the days when these women proudly displayed the Culver pennant in their dining room.

These women were in the midst of enjoying a Cookie-Shine, but the origins of that time honored Pi Phi tradition will have to be saved until another day and time.

 

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Happy Founders’ Day and Centennial Theta Phi Alpha!!!

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

The Theta Phi Alpha Founders are in this picture along with other members.

Theta Phi Alpha’s roots can be traced to the 1909 establishment of a local organization, Omega Upsilon, at the University of Michigan. Father Edward D. Kelly, a Catholic priest and the pastor of the student chapel at Michigan, felt that there should be an organization that could provide the Catholic women at Michigan with an environment that “resembled the Catholic homes from which they came.” This was in a time and place when Catholics were not always welcome in the other fraternal organizations on campus.

By 1912, after Father Kelly left campus and became the Auxiliary Bishop of Detroit*, Omega Upsilon was struggling, likely because there were no alumnae to guide the organization. Even without him being in Ann Arbor, Bishop Kelly’s vision that the Catholic women at Michigan should have a place to call their own was still alive. He enlisted the assistance of Amelia McSweeney, a University of Michigan alumna, Class of 1898. Together with seven Omega Upsilon alumnae, plans were made to establish a new organization. Theta Phi Alpha was founded on August 30, 1912 at the University of Michigan. The ten founders were seven Omega Upsilon alumnae,  two Omega Upsilon undergraduates and Ms. McSwenney.

Since most schools are not in session on August 30, Founders’ Day is celebrated on April 30, the feast day of St. Catherine of Siena. Her motto, “Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring,” is also the motto of Theta Phi Alpha.

The chapter at Michigan remained a local until 1919 when a chapter was formed at the University of Illinois. In 1941, Theta Phi Alpha began expansion to Catholic universities institutions of higher education with the addition of a chapter at Marquette University.

Pi Lambda Sigma was founded as a Catholic sorority at Boston University in June 1921. On June 28, 1952, Pi Lambda Sigma merged with Theta Phi Alpha. The members of the Pi Lambda Sigma chapters at Boston University and the University of Cincinnati became members of the Theta Phi Alpha chapters on the respective campuses. The chapter at Creighton University became the Chi Chapter of Theta Phi Alpha in the fall of 1952 and the Quincy College chapter became the Psi Chapter of Theta Phi Alpha in 1954.

I first heard of Theta Phi Alpha when on a Homecoming weekend in the 1970s, I was sitting on the porch of the Pi Phi house at Syracuse University. Several alumnae stopped by to chat. With them was a Theta Phi Alpha who said that the chapter had closed and her house was no longer standing. Indeed, the Lambda Chapter of Theta Phi Alpha, installed in 1923, closed in 1968. The chapter assets were turned over to the Catholic Newman Center. The Alibrandi Center is located upon the site of the former Theta Phi Alpha house. There is a plaque inside the center thanking the Theta Phi Alphas for their generosity.

Theta Phi Alpha’s Silver Jubilee convention was held in Ann Arbor in 1937. Ann Arbor will also be the site of the Centennial Convention to be held in July 2012. Happy Founders’ Day, Theta Phi Alpha!!!

 

*He ultimately became the Bishop of Grand Rapids and served in that capacity from 1919 until his death in 1926.

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We Wave Thy Colors Brave on High – Happy Founders’ Day Pi Beta Phi!

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.


On April 28, 1867, a college society of women modeled after men’s Greek-letter fraternities was founded at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois.  Its name was I. C. Sorosis and its grip, the  handshake of its members, was accompanied by the secret motto Pi Beta Phi (Spring, 1936).

The founders were Emma Brownlee [Kilgore], Margaret Campbell, Libbie Brook [Gaddis], Ada Bruen [Grier], Clara Brownlee [Hutchinson], Fannie Whitenack [Libbey], Rosa Moore, Jennie Nicol, M.D., Inez Smith [Soule], Fannie Thomson, Jennie Horne [Turnbull], and Nancy Black [Wallace].  In 1888, the name was officially changed to what its motto had been, Pi Beta Phi (Helmick, 1915).

Pi Beta Phi was founded at Holt House in  Monmouth, Illinois on April 28, 1867.

I. C. Sorosis founder Ada Bruen Grier (personal communication, June 22, 1893) offered her recollections of the founding of I. C. Sorosis, “The origin of the society was simply from the girlish impulse of a few of the students at Monmouth College who felt the need of close friendships, and desired to have some institution which could be called their own.  The college was full of Greek-letter societies for the young men but there was only one small society, other than those purely literary in their purpose for the young women.  It was called “The A” for what reason I do not now know, but it was without much enterprise and was not up to the standard some of us had fixed in our minds.”

During the early years any member was vested with the power to establish a chapter in any collegiate institution provided she had the consent of the Alpha chapter at Monmouth College (Lewis, 1899).

The preamble of the I. C. Sorosis constitution reflected the founders’ intention of finding fellowship and “kindred spirits” among the other college women, “Whereas it was deemed necessary, in order to cultivate sincere friendship, establish the real object of life, and promote the happiness of humanity, we, the undersigned ladies of Monmouth College do ordain and establish the following constitution” (Lewis, 1899, p. 4).

Forty years later, founder Fannie Whitenack Libbey (1907) recalled the fraternity’s founding at Monmouth College, “Three of our secrets were these: The first secret was our birthplace.  It was quite generally believed that we were a chapter from an eastern college.  This secret we kept for about fifteen years.  Then it was our greatest secret.  Now that we were the Alpha chapter is our greatest pride.  Our second secret where and from whom we secured our pins.  Had it not been known that our pins were from Chicago, it would soon have been known that we like Topsy – never had no father, no mother, no nothing, just growed.  Our third secret was the meaning we attached to the magic I. C.” (p. 270).

The summer after the founding of I. C. Sorosis, the group got together at the home of Fannie Thomson in Oquawka, Illinois, and had its first convention.  Founder Emma Brownlee Kilgore later described it: “Well laid plans were made of how we would extend the I. C. reputation of being the first woman’s secret society; how we would enter other colleges; no high schools were to be considered; and we also unanimously decided that no college fraternity among the young men should be better, wiser, or stronger than ours (Helmick, 1915, p. 86).

In October of 1867, Brook postponed her college work due to eye problems or “opthalmia” as she called it.  During the summer she persuaded her parents to let her forgo another year at Monmouth.  “Believing that I could accomplish more in a school where I was not acquainted and where there would be no social demands on my time, and with the mental reservation that it might mean the extension of I. C.” she convinced her parents to allow her to change institutions (Gaddis, 1904, p. 237).

In September of 1868, she enrolled at Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.  She described it thusly, “During my stay in ‘I. W. U.’ I succeeded in organizing a chapter of I. C., the first in the history of expansion” (“Our founders,” 1917, p. 461).  On December 21, 1868, the second chapter of I. C. Sorosis came into being.  Gaddis noted “On New Year’s eve we wore our arrows for the first time to the Beta banquet” (p. 461).  Iowa Alpha charter member Jessie Donnell-Thomas (1916) stated that initiation was “carefully planned as not
to interfere with study or recitation hours” (p. 482).

Delta chapter of I. C. Sorosis was founded at the Mount Pleasant Female Seminary in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.  The chapter was installed by Prude Kibben and I. C. founder Nancy Black [Wallace] in November 1869.  It closed in 1871 due to the  Seminary administration’s opposition to secret societies.  Most of its members were absorbed into the Iowa Alpha chapter also located in Mount Pleasant (Spring, 1936).

In 1870, Kate F. Preston left Mount Pleasant and founded a chapter at Indiana Asbury College (now De Pauw University), in Greencastle, Indiana.  Epsilon Chapter of I. C. Sorosis was in existence until 1877 and there were 13 initiates.

Mary Brook, Libbie’s sister, followed on the mission of expansion, entering Lombard College at Galesburg, Illinois.  There, in 1872, she established the Illinois Beta chapter.

Coeducation and the History of Women’s Fraternities 1867-1902 by Frances DeSimone Becque, 2002, Dissertation, Southern Illinois University, pages 19-22, all rights reserved.

Hopefully the entire disseration will be available on this web-site very soon.

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