Sigma Sigma Sigma was founded on April 20, 1898, at the State Female Normal School in Farmville, Virginia (now Longwood University). It was a member of the Association of Education Sororities (AES) until the AES groups joined the National Panhellenic Conference after World War II.
Tri Sigma’s Women of Distinction honor began at the 1998 Convention celebrating its centennial. Among the first recipients of the honor was Bess Brower Willis. An initiate of the Randolph-Macon Woman’s College chapter. After graduation, she taught mathematics at Southern Seminary, in Buena Vista, Virginia. She taught grade school and was principal of a Manassas grade school.
The reason she gets the highlight is that she is a woman after my own heart. In 1917, she wrote the first history of Tri Sigma, compiling all the pertinent information in one place so that it could be a foundation for future histories. It is about 30 pages featuring biographies of the founders, brief information about chapters and a synopsis of the conventions.
On Wednesday, June 18, 1913, Bess Brower married Russell Holman Willis in St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal church in Haymarket, Virginia. He was a lawyer who would go on to serve in the Virginia Senate and the Virginia House of Delegates.
The wedding took place at 8 o’clock in the evening. She was “exquisitely gowned in white charmeuse, trimmed in rhinestones, and carried a shower bouquet of sweet peas and lilies-of-the-valley, her tulle veil being finished with a coronet of the same delicate flowers.” An informal reception followed the ceremony. They were driven in a “touring car” from Haymarket to Manassas. There they boarded a train for a trip south and they returned home about a month later.
This snippet appeared in a 1913 Triangle of Sigma Sigma Sigma. I love that she is excited about ice-tea spoons and that she is adamant about extension. Although she wasn’t a Tri Sigma founder, she certainly was one of its builders.
Willis died in 1952 at the age of 64.
