November 26
FRATERNITY DAY
It all started when nine close friends, meeting over apples and roasted potatoes in a cold and bare dormitory room at Union College in Schenectady, New York, unknowingly put their mark on the entire future of collegiate student organizations. They didn’t originate the idea of a secret Greek-letter society; Phi Beta Kappa had done that 50 years earlier ... nor the concept of a literary society; groups with names like Philomathean and Cliosophic had been around even longer. They didn’t even originate formalized student social groups or college eating clubs; both having long been commonplace.
What John Hart Hunter, one of the nine, proposed on this day in 1825 was to take an informal group calling itself The Philosophers, and formalize it using the strongest characteristics of all these existing institutions. Thus, The Philosophers became Kappa Alpha Society. It was this synthesis that caught the attention of the college world and exploded into the collegiate fraternity system over the following 75 years.
The nine members were Rev. John Hart Hunter, John McGeoch, Prof. Isaac Wilbur Jackson, Dr. Thomas Hun, Orlando Meads, James Proudfit and Hon. Joseph Anthony Constant of the class of 1826, and Rev. Arthur Burtis and Joseph Law of the Class of 1827.
In the words of Arthur Burtis, “After we were domiciled in our upper chamber, in the fourth story of the south section---South College, northeast corner... we now and then beguiled the long winter evenings and entertained our friends with a few baked potatoes and salt and comforted them with apples. Jackson, Hun, Meads, Constant, and McGeoch were often the genial sharers of our simple meal, which was enlivened with mirth and wit and merry song.... It was determined to raise Hunter to an elevated seat on the woodpile, which stood in the corner of the room. When he was exalted to his high eminence, with his pipe in his mouth, he became the leader of this little band. Whereupon I suggested it would be right for us to get our light from this central luminary and that I would carry it to the others.... This band was now beginning to assume shape and form and comely order.”
And that’s the way the first social fraternity was formed in the U.S. We wonder if they had any toga parties...
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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