They seem to have made a deliberate attempt at diversity the eight included the only two members of the Class of 1833 from the Western states (Ohio and Illinois), and also two of the class’s seven members hailing from Southern states. They invited eight classmates to join them. (Alphonso, his son William Howard noted in a speech given at Yale in 1909, had been so determined on a quality college education that he “walked from Vermont to Amherst College, Mass, and then he heard there was a larger college at New Haven, and he walked there.”) Russell, Taft, and their four cofounders were all Phi Beta Kappa. He was joined as a founder by Alphonso Taft, future father of US president William Howard Taft, Class of 1878. The conception seems to have been that of the 1833 valedictorian, class orator, and secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, William Huntington Russell. It was a single forbidding, windowless block in Egypto-Doric style. “Tomb” was the name it attracted when it was built in 1856, and a tomb is what it resembled, even more so than in its current remodeled state. But the oldest fraternity house still standing is the Skull and Bones tomb in New Haven, on High Street near the corner of Chapel. The first fraternity house built in the United States was a log cabin erected in 1855 by Delta Kappa Epsilon at Kenyon College in Ohio. In nineteenth-century America, college fraternities were called “secret societies,” and they met in windowless buildings constructed for the purpose. View full image The New Haven Museum The Skull and Bones tomb as it appeared in its original configuration, with just one rectangular, windowless block. Library of Congress The Skull and Bones building, the oldest US fraternity house still standing, is shown here in the early twentieth century, with the entrance and right-hand block that were added in 1903.
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