Tade Hartsuff Kuhns on Kappa Kappa Gamma’s Founders’ Day

On October 13, 1870, Kappa Kappa Gamma was founded at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois. Having walked the Monmouth campus and downtown many times, I always try to envision what life was like for those 1870 coeds. It never fails to amaze me that Kappa and its Monmouth Duo partner, Pi Beta Phi, are here today. Both were forced to cease operations when the college banned all fraternal organizations in the late 1870s. In those days, the Alpha chapter, the Mother chapter, was typically the head of governance of the organization. It issued charters and ran the show. Lucky for both Kappa and Pi Phi that the women who joined the other young chapters of the organizations took charge of things and continued without the respective Alpha chapters. One of the most influential of early Kappa Kappa Gamma members was Tade Hartsuff of the Mu Chapter at Butler University. As an undergraduate she advocated for a Grand Council governance model and she proposed the founding of a fraternity magazine. She served as Kappa’s first Grand President while still an undergraduate. During her term of office, Kappa invited six groups to a meeting in Boston. It was the first attempt at Panhellenic cooperation. She was Grand President from 1881-1884. She graduated the same year as she left office. In 1886, she married John Bugher Kuhns, a member of Phi Delta Theta. Elizabeth Gowdy Baker, a Kappa Kappa Gamma alumna from the Monmouth College chapter, was well known in the art world.  Kuhns, the subject of this full length portrait, gave it to Kappa Kappa Gamma at its Golden Jubilee convention in 1920. Tade Hartsuff Kuhns, loved to travel and she loved to attend Kappa conventions. She planned her world travels for the off-convention years. Kuhns would often wear jewelry and clothing she purchased as she traveled. She slowly lost her ability to hear, making it difficult to carry on conversations. Because of this conventions were difficult for her, but nonetheless, she truly enjoyed being among her Kappa sisters. At the 1928 Breezy Point convention:

Following the custom begun several years ago, a special table has been presided over, at each luncheon, by Mrs. Tade Hartsuff Kuhns, beloved first grand president. Each day 11 or 12 delegates from active chapters have received personal invitation written in the name of Mrs. Kuhns. At the request of National President Mrs. Lloyd-Jones these invitations are to be taken by the delegates to their respective chapter, to be preserved in the archives chests as historic treasures.

Kuhns attended the reinstallation of Kappa’s Alpha Chapter at Monmouth College in 1934. She was hit by an automobile in March of 1937 and died later that year. An editorial in The Key reflected on the loss:

The realization that never again will the fraternity be honored by Mrs. Kuhn’s presence at any of its meetings is staggering. For through her was preserved the living sense of the fraternity’s continuity with that brilliant past to which she contributed so much. It was through her, and almost through her alone, that the fraternity was virtually reorganized after the first 11 years of its existence. It is a tribute to her progressive thought that the reorganization was along lines which have required little fundamental change in the 56 years since she took office.