Beginnings at Howard College

The history of Phi Gamma Delta at Samford University reaches back nearly to the earliest years of both the University and the Fraternity itself. Long before Samford carried its present name or occupied its campus in Homewood, the institution was known as Howard College and was located in Marion, Alabama. It was there, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, that Phi Gamma Delta first established a presence at the institution.

Howard College had been incorporated in 1841 by the Alabama Baptist State Convention and opened in Marion in 1842. The college was still a relatively young institution when Phi Gamma Delta arrived. Founded nationally in 1848 at Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, Phi Gamma Delta was itself less than a decade old when efforts began to establish a chapter at Howard.

On January 30, 1856, the Grand Chapter of Phi Gamma Delta at Jefferson College recorded receiving a request for the materials necessary to establish a chapter at Howard College. The request was approved, and John J. Harris of the Fraternity's Theta Chapter at the University of Alabama was appointed to assist with the establishment of the new chapter. The resulting group became the Mu Chapter of Phi Gamma Delta, one of the Fraternity's earliest chapters and the first fraternity established at Howard College.

Mu Chapter

The original charter members of Mu Chapter were B. B. McKenzie, Julius A. Greer, Andrew J. Holman, Thomas M. Lenoir, Wright H. Lavender, and Henry Snell. Although the precise date on which the formal installation ceremony occurred is not completely clear in surviving records, Phi Gamma Delta recognizes the chapter's establishment in 1856. The chapter expanded rapidly during its first years. Fraternity records indicate that several men were initiated during late 1856 and that another group joined during the spring of 1857. Within a short period, Mu had grown into a significant organization on a campus that enrolled only a few dozen collegiate students.

Mu Chapter quickly became more than an isolated chapter in Alabama. Its members participated in the early expansion of Phi Gamma Delta across the South. One member of Mu, Major Dowell Sterrett, transferred from Howard College and helped establish the Fraternity's Omicron Chapter at the University of Virginia. This connection placed Mu Chapter within the broader story of Phi Gamma Delta's early growth during a period in which the Fraternity was still establishing itself nationally.

War and interruption

The chapter's early success, however, occurred during an increasingly difficult period for fraternities at Howard College. By 1860, surviving Fraternity correspondence indicated that the college faculty had become hostile toward secret societies. Phi Gamma Delta's records from that period describe growing pressure against the chapter, and Mu's membership began to decline as older members graduated or left the college without enough new initiates replacing them.

At the same time, the United States was approaching the Civil War. Alabama seceded from the Union in January 1861, and the effects were immediate at Howard College. According to Phi Gamma Delta's historical research, 42 of the 62 students attending Howard during the 1860–1861 academic year volunteered for Confederate military service before commencement. Between the faculty's opposition to fraternities, declining enrollment within the chapter, and the disruption caused by the war, Mu Chapter ceased operations by the end of the 1860–1861 academic year.

Although Mu Chapter disappeared, Howard College survived.

The institution eventually recovered from the upheaval of the Civil War and continued to grow. In 1887, Howard College moved from Marion to the East Lake area of Birmingham. Decades later, the college relocated again, this time to its present campus in Homewood in 1957. In 1965, Howard College officially became Samford University. Through all of those changes, the historical connection between Phi Gamma Delta and the institution remained: the school known today as Samford had once been home to one of Phi Gamma Delta's earliest chapters.

For more than a century after the Civil War, however, Phi Gamma Delta did not have an undergraduate chapter at Samford.

The return: Mu Psi

That changed in the twenty-first century.

More than 160 years after the original Mu Chapter existed at Howard College, a new generation of Samford students began building Phi Gamma Delta once again. Rather than inheriting an established chapter, the men responsible for the modern organization faced the task of creating one. They recruited the first members, established the internal structure of the organization, developed its culture and traditions, worked with Samford University and the International Fraternity, and completed the requirements necessary to move from a developing group into a fully chartered chapter.

The effort represented something historically unusual. These students were not simply introducing Phi Gamma Delta to Samford for the first time. They were restoring a connection between the Fraternity and the University that had begun before the Civil War, when Samford was still Howard College in Marion.

The name Mu Psi therefore marks a new chapter in a much older story.

Legacy

When the original Mu Chapter was founded in 1856, Howard College had existed for only about fourteen years and Phi Gamma Delta for less than eight. Those early brothers helped establish the Fraternity in Alabama and contributed to its expansion during its formative years. Their chapter ultimately disappeared under circumstances shaped by institutional opposition and one of the most disruptive periods in American history.

More than a century and a half later, Phi Gamma Delta returned to the institution they once called home.

The chartering of Mu Psi did not simply establish another fraternity chapter at Samford. It restored a relationship first formed in Marion in 1856. The men who founded Mu Psi inherited a history that began with six charter members at a small Alabama college and continued through the growth and transformation of both the University and the Fraternity.

Mu Psi represents both a new chapter and a return: a modern brotherhood carrying forward a connection first established by the brothers of Mu nearly two centuries ago.