New images of Yale societies were added February 2004.
1 The only recent book to deal exclusively with the architecture of secret societies seems to be C. Lance Brockman's Theatre of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry 1896-1929 (Minneapolis: Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, dist. by University Press of Mississippi, 1996).
2 Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton 1746-1894 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 206.
3 Ibid., 208.
4 Thomas Spencer Harding, College literary societies: their contribution to higher education in the United States, 1815-1876 (New York, Pageant Press International [1971]), 19.
5 Ibid., 22.
6 Wertenbaker, 201.
7 Lewis Sheldon Welch, "The Yale Campus," in Lewis Sheldon Welch and Walter Camp, Yale: Her Campus, Class-Rooms, and Athletics (Boston: L.C. Page & Co., 1899), 92-4.
8 Baxter Perry Smith, The History of Dartmouth College (Boston: 1878), 85.
9 Harding, 1. Rudolph, 137.
10 Harding, 1.
11 Harding, 25, citing David Potter, Debating in the Colonial chartered colleges: an historical survey, 1642 to 1900 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1944), 64.
12 Edwin J. Bartlett, A Dartmouth Book of Remembrance (Hanover: The Webster Press, 1922), 92.
13 Wertenbaker, 228-9.
14 Harding, 306.
15 Genevieve B. Williamson, "When the Students Owned the Library," Dartmouth College Library Bulletin 2, no. 1 (October 1958), 11.
16 Lyman Flint, "A Book of Accounts Commencing August 22, 1838," (1838-42), in William Willard Flint, Jr., and Dorothea Flint, "Lyman Flint's Expense Book," Historical New Hampshire 7, no. 2 (November 1951), 15, 9. He was also in the Theological Society and Phi Beta Kappa.
17 Harding, 21.
18 Ibid., 22.
19 Ibid., 252, 267 citing 1876 bureau of education report.
20 Paul Venable Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 1984), 11.
21 Williamson, 7-8.
22 Alpheus Crosby, A Memorial of the College Life of the Class of 1827, Dartmouth College: A Centenary Contribution to the History of their Alma Mater (Hanover, 1869), 16.
23 Henry Frederick Lenning, A Social and Architectural History of Dartmouth Hall (A.B. thesis, Dartmouth College, 1937), 17.
24 Leon Burr Richardson, A History of Dartmouth College (Hanover: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932), 1: 355-8. The short-lived University relinquished control after the 1819 Supreme Court decision in the Dartmouth College Case.
25 Williamson 9-11.
26 Ibid. 19.
27 Harding, 36 citing Lord 1913, 515.
28 Ibid., 36-7. In 1826 the Social Friends and in 1827 the United Fraternity also received charters from the Legislature according to Smith, 140
29 Lenning, 20. Photographs of this arrangement surely exist.
30 Ibid., 19.
31 Harding, 268, 42, 47, citing Society of Social Friends, Constitituion and laws of the Social Friends, in Dartmouth College, amended and adopted Nov. 13, 1861 (Hanover: Dartmouth Press, 1862), 3, 9.
34 Williamson 11.
33 Harding, 44.
34 Edwin J. Bartlett, A Dartmouth Book of Remembrance (Hanover: The Webster Press, 1922), 15-16.
35 Harding, 263 citing Potter, 89-90.
36 Smith 161, 182.
37 Williamson 12.
38 Harding, 263-4, citing Charles M. Hough to M.D. Bisbee (9 November 1901).
39 The Dartmouth 24 (29 May 1903): 517; Quint, 171; Williamson, 12.
40 Harding, 267; Welch, 92-4.
41 Wertenbaker, 354. The period of the late 1860s and 1870s was a period of great growth for literary societies in Western colleges according to Harding, 285.
42 Richardson, 2: 496; William Raimond Baird, Baird's Manual of American College Fraternities (New York: Alcolm Co.: 1905), 347.
43 Baird, 452.
44 Aegis 1893 (1892), 55. The year of Psi Upsilon's foundation is usually given as 1841, which is likely the date of the founding of Omega Phi. The U.N.Y. chapter was the second Psi Upsilon chapter.
45 Aegis 1893, 57. This group has neither affiliated with a national organization nor propogated itself elsewhere, making it the nation's oldest local Greek-letter fraternity after Lambda Iota (the Owl) of UVM (1836), Eclectic (Phi Nu Theta) at Wesleyan (1837), according to Baird, 339-55.
46 Baird, 456.
47 Crosby, 17.
48 Rudolph, 145-47.
49 Richardson 2: 496-7. A "rush" at the time was a fight between classes often caused by older students pushing or "rushing" freshmen out of chapel. In some cases it was a free-for-all in which one side aimed at keeping a cane or football, organized in the name of fellowship according to Sheldon, 102-106.
50 Student quoted in Richardson, 2: 496.
51 Thwing, American Colleges (New York: Putnam's, 1883). Albert P. Jacobs, Greek Letter Societies (Detroit: Gulley printing house, 1879) also lumps Greek-letter societies along with Skull & Bones under the category of secret societies. The Illinois Legislature defined secret societies in a 1919 ban on high school societies: "A public school fraternity, sorority, or secret society, as contemplated by this act, is hereby defined to be any organization, composed wholly or in part of public school students, which sees to perpetuate itself by taking additional members from the students enrolled in such school on the basis of the decision of the membership, rather than upon the free choice of any student who is qualified by the school to fill the specific aims of the organization" (quoted in Harry C. McKeown, School clubs, their organization, administration, supervision, and activities (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 169.
52 Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 7-9, 14, 36.
53 Albert C. Stevens, Cyclopaedia of Fraternities (New York: E.B. Treat & Co., 1907) republished 1966 by Gale Research, Detroit, 332.
54 Albert P. Jacobs, Greek Letter Societies ([no publisher given], 1879).
55 Jacobs, 7.
56 Thwing, 77.
57 The organization transformed into a club in the 1860s called the AD Club. The name "AD" sounded like the boat "Hiadee" according to Frederick O. Vaille and Henry Alden Clark, The Harvard Book (1875), 2: 391. The national organization abandoned the chapter in 1865 and refounded Alpha Delta Phi there in 1872. Similarly Delta Kappa Epsilon of 1851 transformed into Dicky Club in the 1860s, for a time a sophomore society according to Stevens, 352. A few other mid-to-late 19C clubs include the Zeta Psi Club, the Delta Phi Club (Delphic after losing its charter in 1901), the Phi Delta Psi Club, and the S.K. Club.
57 Walter Havinghurst, The Miami Years 1809-1969 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1969), 91, 92, 96, 98.
59 Jacobs, 48; Rudolph, 147-48.
60 Baird, 139.
61 Jacobs, 48.
62 Richardson, 2: 496.
63 Student quoted in Richardson, 2:496
64 Richardson, 2: 496-7.
65 The organization returned 1871-3 according John Robson, ed., Baird's Manual of American College Fraternities (Menasha, Wi.: George Banta Co., Inc., 1957), 84, not to be revived again until 1920.
66 Aegis 1893, 61.
67 Ibid., 67. Phi Zeta Mu became a chapter of Sigma Chi in 1893 and went local as the Tabard in 1960.
68 Aegis 1893, 69. In 1870 Vitruvian established a Beta chapter at Cornell and 1873 a Gamma chapter at Wooster U., Ohio; the first died in 1874 and the second in 1877 (Baird, 44, 443, 515 ). Aegis 1893, 69 gives both chapters as 1873. In the Grafton County Deed books "Vitruvian Society " is occasionally confused with "Unitarian Society" as the books note. Vitruvian became a chapter of Beta Theta Pi in 1889 and was banished in 1997.
69 Richardson, 2: 497 citing Phoenix 1855.
70 "Laws of Dartmouth College" (Hanover: The Dartmouth Press, 1877), 10.
71 Aegis 1893, 61.
72 The I.O.O.F. (International Order of Odd Fellows) lettering on the western Bridgman Block of 1906, today occupied by the Co-op, seems the only exterior expression of any sort of secret society on Main Street, unless the brick diamond figure in the gable of the eastern Bridgman Block, which once surmounted a decorative circular window, represents a similar organization.
73 Aegis 1893, 61.
74 Edwin J. Bartlett, A Dartmouth Book of Remembrance (Hanover: The Webster Press, 1922), 35 reports that this was the first society to do so.
75 Ibid.
76 Franklin E. Heald, "Fraternity Life at Dartmouth,"The American University Magazine 3, no. 1 (November 1895), 60.
77 Aegis 1893, 59.
78 Ibid., 61.
79 Frank J. Barrett, Jr., 1997 Town of Hanover calendar "Main Street."
80 Aegis 1893, 67.
81 Ibid., 69.
82 Ibid., 61.
83 Heald, 60.
84 Ibid., 63.
85 Ibid., 73. Students of the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts were not allowed to join College organizations, and also set up a Culver Literary Society and associated library which appears in Aegis 1872-3 for the first time according to John P. Hall, et al., History of the University of New Hampshire 1866-1941 (Durham: U.N.H. Press, 1941), 43. Q.T.V. was established at Massachusetts State College in 1869 and merged with Kappa Sigma after 1900.
86 Aegis 1893, 65. I am not sure where it first met.
87 Thwing, 72-3.
88 Where societies do not have buildings, they find other means of advertising: all the major buildings at the University of Virginia, including the fraternities and sororities, bear permanently-painted symbols of the two most active student secret societies, Z and Imp; the more adult 7 Society also paints its name. A photo of Old East at U.N.C. bearing a typical multi-numeraled Z emblem appears in the frontispiece of Archibald Henderson's The Campus of the First State University (Chapel Hill: U.N.C. Press, 1949), hinting that the society painted beyond its borders.
89 The organization built a $50 cabin in the woods in 1853 on land the college granted it according to Aldice G. Warten, ed., Catalog of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity (New York: Delta Kappa Epsilon Council, 1910), 560. Turner on 106 provides the year, citing William Bodin, The Kenyon Book (Columbus Oh.: 1890), 281-5, though Turner writes that the cabin was an abandoned building that the group occupied. The fraternity replaced the cabin in 1871 with a simple gable-roofed vertically-sided and apparently windowless hall in the woods; the doorway was a pointed arch. The group was the first fraternity at Kenyon and was founded in June of 1852.
90 George Wilson Pierson, Yale College: An Educational History 1871-1921 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 584 n18.
91 J.K. Lord, A History of the Town of Hanover (Hanover: Dartmouth Press, 1928), 64. Baird, 347 gives the date as 1862.
92 Heald, 56. Other than the Kenyon group and Skull & Bones, the only contemporary hall I have found is the 1860 York St. building of Delta Kappa Epsilon junior society at Yale.
92a Ashton R. Willard, "The Development of College Architecture in America," The New England Magazine 22, No. 5 (July 1897), 530.
93 Richardson, 2: 561.
94 Russell Henry Chittenden, A History of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, 1846-1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 2: 494-5.
95 Welch, 117-18.
96 Chittenden, 2: 494-5.
97 Ruth Ryley Selden, "Henry Bacon and his Work at Wesleyan University," (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1974), 31.
98 Welch, 115. Buildings and Grounds of Yale University.
99 Pierson, 35.
100 Ibid., 584 n18.
101 Thwing, 77.
102 Sheldon, 176.
102aWillard, 530.
103 Robertson & Potter, letter to editor, American Architect and Building News 82 no. 1451 (17 October 1903): 23. Their work was pictured in the 26 September edition. For more on the society see Ron Rosenbaum, "Exposing Skull & Bones: The Most Secret Society," Esquire (September 1977): 84-89, 148-150; Stevens, 338-340.
104 Pierson, 584 n18.
105 "Works of the Late R.M. Hunt," Architectural Record 5 (October-December 1895): 113.
106 Thwing, 77.
107 Pierson, 584 n18.
108 Inland Architect and News Record 16, no. 3 (October 1890): 35. Bertram G. Goodhue designed the 1924-26 Wolf's Head that presumably replaced this building.
109 Richardson, 2:644. In 1882 students were first chosen from the freshman class during fall term, and it remained thus until Spring 1895 when chinning season was postponed until November 20th, writes Heald on 56, 60. One often sees ads in The Dartmouth forbidding upperclassmen to mention societies to any freshmen in this period.
110 Baird, 429.
111 Aegis 1895 (1894), 67. Theta Nu Epsilon [formerly http://www.pe.net/ ~notnes/html/open_letter.html]. See also Philip Weiss, "The Most Powerful Fraternity in America," Esquire (April 1992), 102-110.
112 The Dartmouth 26 (10 March 1905): 337.
113 The Dartmouth 42 (16 May 1921): 1. Green Key followed the model of the Knights of the Hook at the University of Washington which had so competently escorted the visiting Dartmouth Football team when it played at the dedication of the new stadium there.
114 Aegis 1879 (1878).
115 The Dartmouth 33 (27 April 1912): 1.
116 "Yale Societies Hold Tap-Day Elections," New York Times (26 May 1905).
117 Welch, 99-100.
118 Lillie Ng, "Secret Societies: 360 will be invitied to join - will you be one?" The Dartmouth (1 February 1997).
119 Aegis 1895
120 Ng.
121 Bryant Franklin Tolles, Jr. with Carolyn K. Tolles, New Hampshire Architecture : An Illustrated Guide (Hanover: Published for the New Hampshire Historical Society by the University Press of New England, 1979), 295.
122 Barrett, quoted in Ng. The Sphinx had Jens Larson add to the rear of its tomb in the 1920s.
123 Dragon appears as owning a house at 21 North Main St. by 1905.
124 Barrett, Hanover, New Hampshire, Images of America series (Dover, N.H.: Arcadia Publishing, 1997), 68. Dartmouth Alumni Magazine 29, no. 1 (October 1936), 25
125 Aegis 1893 (1892), 57.
125a Willard, 530.
126 Heald, 56.
127 Turner, 216.
128 Ashton R. Willard, "The Development of College Architecture in America," The New England Magazine 16, no. 5 (July 1897), 512-34.
129 Heald, 56.
130 Robert French Leavens and Arthur Hardy Lord, Dr. Tucker's Dartmouth (Hanover: Dartmouth Publications, 1965), 55.
131 Frank Basil Tracy, "How the Colleges Start," Boston Evening Transcript (20 October 1906), 2.
132 Turner, 216.
133 Ibid., 150.
134 Dartmouth College Trustees' Records 5 (26 September 1902), Dartmouth College Archives, 320. Kappa Kappa Kappa was given a five-year exception at the meeting since its house held seventeen but had been bought before the policy came into effect.
135 Pi Lambda Phi occupied the 1887 Catholic Church at 7 East South St.; Sigma Alpha Epsilon occupied the pre-1855 Ashbel Hotel or the Paul House at 6 School St.; Epsilon Kappa Phi occupied the nurses' home of the 1874 Pike House on North Main St.
136 Delta Tau Delta bought the 1898 Furber House at 8 School St. by 1905 according to J.K. Lord, 66.
137 Delta Kappa Epsilon bought the 1772 Storrs Tavern house east of today's Sigma Delta on West Wheelock St. in 1908. It no longer stands.
138 "Goat Room" was a nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century term for a meeting room, appearing in the title of the fraternity gossip section of the 1922Aegis "Heard at the Goat Room Keyhole" (493). The term was used at C&G for example; Sigma Nu still calls its meeting room by this name though it has transformed the spelling into the acronym GOTE. The term is peculiar to fraternities and derives from scapegoat according to Alfred H. Holt, Phrase Origins (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1936), 141.
139 Morrison 481-4; 487-93. Phi Delta Theta opened in March of 1902 according to The Dartmouth 23
(28 March 1902):423.
140 The Dartmouth 29 (24 April 1908): 567. The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (November 1943) credits Fred W. Wentworth with the house in his obituary.
141 Barrett 1997, 88. Kappa Sigma demolished the building in 1937.
142 The Dartmouth 32 (8 May 1911): 3. Sigma Chi burned in 1931.
143 Aegis 1893, 69.
144 Thed:Vol. 21: Mar 2 1900 p.331.
145 Oswald Constantin Hering, Designing and building the chapter house (Menasha, Wis: George Banta Publishing Co, [c1931]).
146 Barrett 1997, 19.
147 Ibid., 88. Charles E. Widmayer,"Twelve Months in Review," Dartmouth Alumni Magazine 30, no. 6 (March 1938), 12.
148 Hering, 15.
149 Mills Lane, Architecture of the Old South (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1987), 40.
150 McKim, Charles F., William R. Mead and Stanford White, The Architecture of McKim, Mead & White in Photographs, Plans and Elevations (New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1990), plate 79. Contemporary descriptions classed it as "Georgian," more reminiscent of English Renaisance architecture than American Colonial : "Sigma Nu House, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.," Architectural Forum (December 1925): 363.
151 Gamma Delta Chi, Phi Gamma Delta [Sigma Delta], and Kappa Sigma of 1937 appear to be the most recent new houses.
152 Spencer Morgan '60, quoted in Ng. A copy of the unbuilt Larson & Wells design is in the folder "Fraternities Secret Societies" in DC Hist Iconong 456 "proposed buildings never built," Dartmouth College Archives. The society intended to build the hall on the Webster Avenue lot that Kappa Kappa Kappa now occupies, since it was then owned by the College.
153 "Works of the Late R.M. Hunt," 113.
Scott Meacham, "Halls, Tombs and Houses: Student Society Architecture at Dartmouth," Dartmo.: The Buildings of Dartmouth College (1999, updated Feb. 2004) at http://www.dartmo.com/halls (viewed [date]).
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No text at right? View in frames Written March 1999 Last modified February 2004 ©1999 Scott Meacham.