Kappa Delta was founded on October 23, 1897 at the State Female Normal School (now Longwood University) in Farmville, Virginia. Its founders are Lenora Ashmore Blackiston, Julia Gardiner Tyler Wilson, Sara Turner White and Mary Sommerville Sparks Hendrick. Kappa Delta, along with Zeta Tau Alpha, Sigma Sigma Sigma and Alpha Sigma Alpha, was founded at the same institution and comprise the “Farmville Four.” (Two of them joined the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) and the other two became members of the Association of Education Sororities (AES) – before AES members became a part of NPC but that is a story for another day.)
I once had the opportunity to tour Kappa Delta’s Headquarters with KD’s Archivist Shirley Gee. One thing I did not expect to see was a green chair from a baseball stadium. Shirley told me the reason why it’s there.
Janet Marie Smith, an initiate of the Delta Omega Chapter at Mississippi State, is a an architect and urban planner. She is the Los Angeles Dodgers’ senior vice president of planning and development. Smith was instrumental in upgrades to Dodger Stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Fenway Park, and Turner Field. In 2013, she was the commencement speaker at her Alma Mater. That year, she was also a speaker at Kappa Delta’s 60th Biennial Convention Boston. The convention body then took in a baseball game at Fenway Park, seeing Smith’s work up close and personal.
In a feature in The Angelos, Smith said that she in the late 1970s, she was one of a handful of women studying architecture and that Kappa Delta gave her a refuge from the pressure of studying architecture”
It was freeing to be with women. It was freeing to know we were ‘sisters,’ and the judgmental nature of humans was set aside for a moment as we shared the bond of being together…Mostly, from KD, I think I learned to dream…And as my confidence in myself grew, I realized I could do more than meet expectations. I could make dreams come true.
