I recall so vividly visiting the Alpha Xi Delta house at Syracuse University in the mid 1970s. The designer Betsey Johnson was Eta Chapter’s most famous alumna. Chapter lore included the tidbit that she had carved her name in a piece of furniture, a bed perhaps. I also remember being told that the current chapter house was designed by an alumna of the chapter.
I found a 1907 copy of The Quill of Alpha Xi Delta edited by the Eta Chapter at Syracuse. The Eta Chapter letter includes this wonderful snippet of campus news, “October 19th was the formal opening of Archbold Stadium at Syracuse University. It has a seating capacity of 50,000 and is constructed of solid concrete. Several other new building are in use this fall – the Carnegie Library, Machinery Hall of Smith College and the Lyman Hall of Natural History while the new Chemistry Building is in the process of construction and foundations are laid for the new men’s gymnasium.”
Archbold Stadium Opened in 1907.
Alpha Xi Delta was founded at Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois on April 17, 1893. Its founders were Cora Bollinger Block, Alice Bartlett Bruner, Bertha Cook Evans, Harriett Luella McCollum, Lucy W. Gilmer, Lewie Strong Taylor, Almira Lowry Cheney, Frances Elisabeth Cheney, Eliza Drake Curtis Everton, and Julia Maude Foster.
Coeducational from its beginning, Lombard College was founded in 1853 by the Universalist Church. Originally called the Illinois Liberal Institute, its name was changed in 1855, after a fire damaged much of the college. Businessman and farmer Benjamin Lombard gave the college a large gift to build a new building and the institution was named in his honor. Among its students was Carl Sandburg.
On the other side of the Mississippi River, about 80 miles west of the Lombard College campus, the original chapter of P.E.O. at the Iowa Wesleyan College, was in a quandary. P.E.O. had begun as a collegiate organization and made its debut on the campus about a month after the organization of the Iowa Alpha Chapter of Pi Beta Phi. For many years, the two were intense competitors on the campus. P.E.O. ultimately became a community organization and left the college field. In 1902, Iowa Wesleyan College’s Chapter S of the P.E.O. Sisterhood became the Beta Chapter of Alpha Xi Delta. This move certified that Alpha Xi Delta was now a national organization, rather than just a local on the Lombard campus, and the P.E.O. Sisterhood became an organization of community adult women.
The 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression hit Lombard College extremely hard and the college closed its doors. The last class graduated in 1930. Knox College invited the Lombard students to transfer to Knox, with the same tuition cost as Lombard, and without loss of academic standing. Knox also incorporated the Lombard alumni into the Knox Alumni Association.
