The History of Delta Phi at PennPenn's Eta chapter was established on 1 January 1849; the national fraternity was founded in 1827 at Union College in Schenectady, New York. The Eta chapter flourished at Penn for two decades, but in 1872 the undergraduate yearbook, The Record, noted that the chapter had disbanded in 1871. A page dedicated to Delta Phi re-appeared in The Record of 1882 with the following annotation: "Established January 1, 1849. Re-established March 3, 1882." Penn's Eta chapter has remained in continuous existence since 1882.
Kappa Alpha (1825), Sigma Phi (1827), and Delta Phi (1827) together made up the "Union Triad," the three oldest Greek letter fraternities in American colleges. Delta Phi was the first of these to establish a chapter at Penn. Penn's Eta chapter was Delta Phi's seventh, following Union (1827), Brown (1838), NYU (1841), Columbia (1842), Rutgers (1845), and Harvard (1845).
Will J. Maxwell's 1899 compilation, Greek Letter Men of Philadelphia (1899) stated that five College students were the founders of the Eta chapter. They were James Larrabee Appley (A.B. 1849); two brothers, Henry James Feltus (Class of 1850, non-grad.) and William James Feltus (A.B. 1849), Jesse Shenton Zane Sellers (A.B. 1849; M.D. 1852), and William Hembel Taggart (A.B. 1849, M.D. 1852).
In 1907 the national Delta Phi organization commissioned the production of a definitive account of the fraternity and Arthur G. Freeland edited the 615-page Delta Phi Catalogue, 1827-1907. Freeland confirmed the names of the five organizers of Penn's Eta chapter and also documented the Eta chapter's roster of members, which included fifteen initiates in 1849, five in 1850, five in 1851, and seven in 1852. Penn's Biographical Catalogue of the Matriculates of the College (1894) shows that fully thirty two of these thirty seven students completed the undergraduate course and earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts. This was at a time when the average graduation rate at Penn was only sixty-five percent. An in-depth analysis would be needed to prove or disprove the point, but it appears that in its first decade, the Eta chapter conferred a clear advantage upon its members in their pursuit of the bachelor's degree.
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