Alpha Sigma Alpha was founded on November 15, 1901 at the State Female Normal School (now Longwood University) in Farmville, Virginia. Its founders had been asked to join some of the other sororities on campus, but they wanted to stay together. The five, Virginia Lee Boyd (Noell), Juliette Jefferson Hundley (Gilliam), Calva Hamlet Watson (Wootton), Louise Burks Cox (Carper) and Mary Williamson Hundley, started their own sorority; they called it Alpha Sigma Alpha.
In 1921, the 20th anniversary of the founding of the sorority was marked by a convention at the Hotel Muehlebach in Kansas City.
“Probably no other organization in the Hellenic world can boast, as Alpha Sigma Alpha can, of having present at Convention a member of the faculty from each campus where it has a chapter.” I think these are the faculty members pictured below.
The Hotel Muehlebach was praised in The Phoenix article:
The management gave every detail of the arrangements entrusted to them such personal attention that everyone is most enthusiastic over the hospitality of this great hotel. The parlors placed at the disposal of the Sorority for the business meetings and imitation were all that could be desired and the personal attention given by the matire d’hôtel to the Anniversary Banquet created a most favorable comment.
In addition to the business meetings, the convention included a session with the advisors, a model initiation, a banquet with foods in the sorority colors and a stunt show.
As was common during the time, there was a Stunt Show. The Zeta Zetas from the State Teacher’s College at Warrensburg (now the University of Central Missouri) were “Follies.” Giving a nod to the Ziegfeld Follies, the women wore “brilliant red and white” costumes. They sang and danced to original songs about the sorority. One thinks that much time and talent went into this effort and they were called back for an encore. Photographers took “flashlights of several of the stunts for the pictorial sections of the city papers and some of them are very artistic.”
Hazel Platt, the delegate from the Nu Chapter at Shorter College in Georgia wrote:
The convention has brought the Chapters together in a relationship more sisterly than we have felt before. We who were present at the meetings and the banquet now are acquainted with girls in other chapters; it creates a real national feeling. Especially do we of one of the western chapters feel this closer relationship because there is so great a distance in miles between the eastern chapters and us.
A great deal was gained through the meeting of our National Officers, whom we know through the medium of letters but seldom meet.
The informal discussions during the meetings were helpful in that we discovered that other girls, our sisters, are confronted by problems similar to ours.
We of Nu appreciate our chapter house more than ever since we have learned that there are so few chapters that maintain a house.
