The Kappa Chapter of Alpha Phi was founded on May 20, 1899, eight years after Stanford University opened. A group of female students lived, along with a mother who was acting as a chaperone, in a cottage named Escondita, in a secluded corner of campus. The women and a few of their friends chose to petition Alpha Phi for a charter.
Mary Ishbel Lockey was one of the 14 charter members of Alpha Phi’s Kappa Chapter. The initiation was described in an 1899 Alpha Phi Quarterly:
The glow of wax candles indoors and the splendor of a California moon without may have lightened a little the traditional terrors of initiation, but it was with great earnestness that these new sisters pledged their word to the beloved order that they had talked of and worked for during many months. At last they could wear the dainty pins that had made the long overland journey from Beta and Iota.
That summer, Lockey, along with two chapter sisters, Bessie Henry and Marion Reynolds, did special work in biology at the Marine Laboratory at Pacific Grove.
In early 1900, the chapter members who were of age formed the Alpha Phi Hall Association. Its goal was to build a chapter house. Lockey was a member of the building committee, and ground was broken for the house at 17 Lasuen Street on June 1, 1900. Lockey graduated in 1902. Although she was raised in Montana, the chapter report stated she “will remain quite near us in California.”
When a Phi Beta Kappa chapter was established at Stanford on November 1, 1904, Lockey was the first Alpha Phi elected to membership. In 1905, she “left the last of May for a trip to Boston, traveling through the south by way of New Orleans. She hopes to see as many Alpha Phis on her route as she can find with the aid of her directory.”
On March 7, 1908, 12 of the 26 charter members of Alpha Phi’s San Francisco Alumnae Chapter held their first meeting, and Lockey was elected the alumnae chapter’s first president.
Mary Lockey, Photo courtesy of the Palo Alto Historical Association
In 1911, the chapter correspondent noted, “One of the experiences which we have had lately was a trip to Palo Alto to be guests for the day at Castilleja School which is owned and conducted by Sister Mary Lockey.” She opened the school in 1907 and in 1910 purchased the land on which the school still stands. The “Five Cs.,” Castilleja’s core values are conscience, courtesy, character, courage, and charity.
Ad from the Alpha Phi Quarterly
May Hurlburt Smith, who was also a charter member of the Alpha Phi chapter, wrote about her visit to “Mary’s School” in a 1912 Quarterly:
The buildings (the residence and recitation hall) spread across the whole length of a block, generous and restful in their proportions and arrangement. I walked up the side street. The whole block was taken up by Castilleja; on one side the gymnasium and the tennis and basketball grounds where the girls have out-of-door sports every week in the year except vacations; on the other side the power house and the domestic science building and principal’s (that’s Mary) residence. The southern side of the block lay open to the sunshine, which filled the great patio formed by the buildings and was broken only by the shade of the fine live oaks growing here and there on the green turf. Under one of these trees was a group of girls and a dark-haired little lady, talking excitedly with peals of laughter—second year French class playing a word game! On a pergola porch and in other sunny or shady spots were girls studying, by ones, twos and threes—and I marvelled that they could keep their gaze from wandering over the tree tops to the melting blue skyline of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and staying there. Through a window I heard somebody practicing the piano, thoughtfully.
By the time I had walked around the block my surprise-shaken mind had composed itself into an attitude of humble respect for Sister Mary’s work. Through these three years of getting better acquainted with Castilleja, the respect has grown immensely, and now a thing would have to be just about plu-perfect for me to consider it ‘pretty good, for Mary.’ So that I was not astounded at hearing President David Starr Jordan say a little while ago that there is no better school in the west than Castilleja.
I feel very strongly that in building up and maintaining a school like Castilleja. Mary Lockey has done a work which should make every one of us proud of her. Sometimes I am tempted to take all the credit of its excellence and award it in a lump to Alpha Phi, but I have to admit that the years Mary spent studying and travelling in America and Europe, before ever she came to Stanford, must have contributed something. Mary herself would be the first to attribute everything to the fraternity, for Alpha Phi holds the lead in her heart—at least we believe it does until in the stress of rushing we think we ought to get special privileges to help us win some Castilleja girl, and Mary sticks to her principles; then we understand she could not love us near so much, loved she not honor more.
The ideals of Castilleja show in every detail of its equipment and management. Throughout it is genuine, simple, modern and appropriate. If there is any one phase of the girls’ life which receives greater emphasis than others, I believe it is health. Outdoor living comes natural in this pleasant country, and the girls not only work and play out doors, but most of them sleep on the big sleeping porch at the rear of the third story.
For the occasional illness, Mary has provided an attractive ‘restroom,’ with its own bathroom and sunny porch—a room so planned and placed that in case of need it can be expanded into a suite reached by an outside stairway and absolutely sealed away from the rest of the building. This little isolation hospital Doctor Snow, the secretary of the California State Board of Health, has pronounced the most perfect of any private institution he knows. And just recently a girl had mumps there—caught on a visit home, not in Palo Alto, oh, mercy, no!—and no one else took it, though forty other girls in the residence were exposed.
Mary’s deep thoughtfulness and her insistence on the genuine show in so very many ways that it is hard to choose what side of her work to write about. That which interests me, individually, the most is the system by which she herself keeps watch over every side of every girl’s life at school. She regards as her most important duty a constant personal knowledge of the health, conduct, scholarship, recreations and tendencies of each girl, week by week. She accomplishes this by detailed report cards kept by teachers and housemother, monthly teachers’ meetings in which are discussed the possible causes of any marked change for the better or worse in any girl’s record, and frequent friendly consultations with each girl separately, in which praise, encouragement or criticism are dispensed as needed.
Lockey died in 1939. In 1941, her former student Margarita Espinosa, a Stanford Delta Gamma who had taught at the school since 1928, became Principal of the school. Espinosa served until 1971.
Castilleja is still educating young women in grades six through twelve. In 2010, the Lockey Alumnae House at 1263 Emerson Street was dedicated.
