Happy Founders' Day to FarmHouse and Triangle Fraternities
 

Acacia, FarmHouse and Triangle Fraternities are the only members of the North-American Interfraternity Conference (NIC) that do not use Greek-letters. The latter two celebrate Founders' Day on the same day. What's also interesting to note is that both were formed for students in certain majors. In FarmHouse's case it was agriculture. For Triangle it was engineering. Both organizations have since expanded membership eligibility criteria.



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Really interesting that FarmHouse and Triangle have the same Founders' Day.

And of course, Acacia was originally for students who were Masons.

I always have a soft-spot for the fraternities with non-Greek letter names.

How did they come to be named such and become affiliated as Greek organizations? Does anyone have information? I'm impressed they didn't cave to peer pressure to follow the same naming conventions (ADPi and Phi Mu were originally the Adelphean and Philomathean Societies; we changed our name when we joined the NPC).

So that was when you changed your name! I was wondering what the empetis was for such a huge change.

Well I.C. Sororis was founded as a women's fraternity based on the men's fraternity model and by the 1880s the collegians clamored for a name change. It was an interesting convention when the change was made to Pi Beta Phi in 1888.

My feeling about the three NIC members is that there are two to three times as many men's groups and it just wasn't important to them.

When I was at Michigan in the 1890s, there was a local called Collegiate Sorosis (in the 1800s it had been a Kappa Alpha Theta chapter). The members decided in the 1980s that they needed Greek letters to compete and they became Chi Sigma. They are no longer on the Michigan campus.

Fraternities with non-Greek letter names weren't unheard of in the 1800s. Rainbow and The Mystical 7 come to mind, and I think there were others. We were, of course, initially founded as the Sinfonia Fraternity, though we started using the Greek letters very early on. (We didn't officially change our name until 1948, though.)

Greek-letter societies arose in a liberal arts context for students who would have studied Greek and Latin. Triangle, FarmHouse and Sinfonia all share the background that they would have been founded for students in specialized degree programs -- engineering, agricultural or music -- for which Greek would not have typically been part of the curriculum at the time. (Indeed, that was an early objection to Greek letters in our name -- Greek wasn't part of a music student's course of study.) I doubt there was too much pressure on Triangle, FarmHouse or Acacia to change their names.

Good point. By the early 1900s when the three were founded, the curriculum had changed from an emphasis on Latin and Greek to more specialized programs.

Do you mean the 1980's or is there something you aren't telling us? :p

While I wish I could say I'm very well preserved, the truth is that I am a lousy typist. 1980s it is.