Alpha Gamma Delta was founded at Syracuse University on May 30, 1904 at the home of Dr. Wellesley Perry Coddington, a Syracuse University professor. The Alpha Gamma Delta Founders are Marguerite Shepard, Jennie Titus Smith, Georgia Otis Chipman, Ethel Evelyn Brown Distin, Flora Knight Mayer, Estelle Shepard Beswick, Emily Helen Butterfield, Edith MacConnell Hickok, Grace Mosher Harter, Mary Louise Snider and Georgia Alberta Dickover.
The chapter’s first house was located at 761 Irving Avenue (for the chapter’s first year, the chapter met in a third floor room, really the entire attic, of a home at 1005 East Genesee Street). The chapter house on Irving was also the site of the first convention on April 30, 1907. Delegates from the Beta Chapter at the University of Wisconsin and the Gamma Chapter at Wesleyan College in Connecticut were in attendance, along with several Alpha Chapter representatives.
One of the more interesting things that happened during 1905-06, the first year in the chapter house, were described in the January 1931 edition of the Alpha Gamma Delta Quarterly, “After the day’s duties, when all is wrapped in slumber, suddenly across the midnight stillness there comes a terrible crash seeming to shake the house from its foundations. What has happened? Perhaps the tower of John Crouse College has fallen. Or a clumsy burglar has stumbled against a substantial piece of furniture. A knock at the door and a voice calling for a candle, starts a search for matches. After a slight delay we marshal our little band for the descent to the first floor where unknown horrors may await, although all is now still as death. Emily [Butterfield, I presume, the future architect and squirrel enthusiast], bolder than the rest, leads; the others following in Indian file. At the last turn of the stairway, she stops suddenly and turning to a line of white faces above, says calmly, ‘Girls, the plaster has fallen in the parlor.'”
Plaster falling was, it seemed, a common occurrence in the house., “Another time during breakfast, a dull thud was heard upstairs. Upon investigation, it was found that the plaster had this time fallen into the bed which Georgia Dickover had just left. A week later the new plaster fell before it was dry, some of it sticking to the floor as long as the chapter lived there.”
For more about the chapter’s current home, at 709 Comstock Avenue, the one designed by founder Emily Butterfield, see http://wp.me/p20I1i-8B
(c) Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2013. All rights reserved.
