The first social event Frances Haven (Moss) attended after enrolling in Syracuse University in 1874 was a church oyster supper. Her father, Dr. Erastus Otis Haven, was recently elected Chancellor of the university. At that supper, she met the man who would become her husband, Charles Melville Moss. She also met two members of Alpha Phi, a women’s fraternity founded at Syracuse in October of 1872. Instead of accepting the invitation to join Alpha Phi which had been offered to her, she joined with three other women – Mary A. Bingham (Willoughby), E. Adeline Curtis, and Helen M. Dodge (Ferguson) – and they found an organization of their own. The date was November 11, 1874. The organization is Gamma Phi Beta, the first of the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) organizations to use the term “sorority;” Syracuse Latin professor Frank Smalley suggested the word to the young women.
The years surrounding World War I and sorority women’s response to the crisis is an interest of mine. In preparation for this post, I went searching a hundred-year-old Crescent of Gamma Phi Beta. I found this entry from its Phi Chapter at Washington University in St. Louis:
We returned for classes September 26, and found everything in a state of chaos, for somehow the work of the Student Army Training Corps would not fit in with the regular work of the college. Finally, when we were used to the unearthly hours for classes, and the courses which we had to take, not because we wanted them, but because they were the only ones offered, the influenza ban stopped all activities. After the first week of expectant waiting for the ban to be lifted and three weeks more of the disturbing boredom, numbers of the girls of the university decided to help in relieving the economic situation and took positions.
The correspondent who wrote that was Frances Barbour. The chapter’s report noted that she was “recently made a member of the Missouri Folk Lore Society for her work done in Ozark ballads.”
Barbour graduated with a Bachelors in 1919 and was awarded a fellowship for graduate study. In January 1920, the chapter reported:
Frances Barbour, our most recent Phi Beta Kappa, holds a fellowship for graduate work. Incidentally, Frances discovered, actually discovered, some ballads last summer in the Ozarks and was asked to talk about them at the Artists’ Guild!
Her name sounded very familiar so I did some more research. An article in the March 1932 Crescent was titled The Vanishing Folk Lore of the Ozarks. Barbour’s passion was the study of folk lore and she contributed to several folk ballad anthologies. The introduction to the article mentioned the she was a “modest person and is loath to tell of her achievements, but her interesting article betrays not only her ability to write but her deep knowledge of her subject.”
More research found that after earning her M.A. she taught at Carbondale Community High School in Illinois, the high school my offspring attended. She then joined the English faculty of Southern Illinois Normal University, as Southern Illinois University Carbondale was then known. She spent her career in Carbondale and retired in 1963.
Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases of Illinois was published two years after her retirement. Copies of the book turn up every now and then at the Friends of Carbondale Public Library Book Sale, which I help coordinate, and when they do, I place in the local interest section. The book contains more than 4,000 regional sayings collected from her students and local residents from 1944 to 1950. Barbour arranged them alphabetically by the first noun. She also referenced them to parallel sayings in more than 100 other collections. Her research was an important reference for those interested in American folklore.
Her name sounded familiar for another reason. It hit me just as I fell off to sleep one night. In 1964, she was a charter member of my P.E.O. chapter. Her name has appeared in every yearbook published since I joined the chapter in 1991. Barbour died in 1979 at the age of 84.
