The Founding of the Kappa Alpha Order
| Between the Alleghenies to the west and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east lies a valley that stretches the entire length of western Virginia. With an average width often to fifteen miles, the valley is composed of rolling farm lands of dark red clay, interspersed with stretches of pine and hardwood forest, all of which is drained by a profusion of rivers and streams. From any prospect upon the valley floor it is possible to perceive the outline of the mountains on either side, which to the viewer seem to rise in the distance from every direction. To the north from Winchester to Staunton, because of the river which meanders along its floor, the valley is called the Valley of the Shenandoah. To the south around Lexington, the valley is known by a more general designation as the Valley of Virginia. |
James Wood Ward
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In early October 1865, James Ward Wood, a twenty year old former Confederate soldier of romantic inclinations, traveled down the Valley of Virginia from his home in Hardy County, West Virginia. His destination was Washington College, an impoverished, ramshackle school of former Presbyterian affiliation located in Lexington, Virginia. Once there, Wood enrolled as a Freshman. |
| Although it had existed under various names in the Valley of Virginia since 1749, Washington College had barely managed to survive the Civil War. In 1864, a Federal raiding party under the command of General David Hunter entered Lexington, looted the college, and left its buildings in a bad state of repair, and burned the Virginia Military Institute, a few blocks away. Most of the student body had vanished during the War, and at the cessation of hostilities in 1865, only four faculty members remained. |
| By the fall of 1865, the citizens of Lexington had reason to hope for the future success off their small college. In early August that year, the Board of Trustees of Washington College had taken a bold step. It invited General Robert Edward Lee to become the president of their poverty stricken institution. To the astonishment of the entire South, Lee accepted. |  |
| After he assumed the duties of his new office, Lee quickly abolished all rules regulating student conduct, including the restrictions against secret fraternities, and established in their place only one regulation - each member of the all-male student population must at all times be a gentleman. |
| So, James Ward Wood of Hardy County, West Virginia, traveled down the valley of Virginia to Washington College in Lexington. He, as did many other former Confederate soldiers, went there "to be taught by the man under whom they had fought."' |
| Four generations of the Wood family had lived in Hardy County, West Virginia as middle class farmers. When the Civil War broke out, the Woods sided with the South, and young James Ward Wood joined a confederate cavalry regiment. Wood's military career ended several months before the fall of the Confederacy. |
| During the final months of the war and through the summer of 1865, Wood remained at home to convalesce. He spent many nights loafing at a country store, listening to the stories of a character named Van Arsdale. Van Aradale, who was a member of the Masonic Lodge, the Royal Arch Masons, and other sundry secret organizations, held his audience's attention by vividly describing the ritualism, oaths, and awful mysteries of secret societies. These lurid descriptions, recounted in the black of night kindled in Wood's mind a fascination for the esoteric. As a result, during the months before he left for Lexington, the young, former Confederate soldier spent much of his time reading his fathers books on Masonry and dreaming of mystic symbols, secret initiations, and fraternal splendor. |
| Mystic symbols fascinated Wood, and often, he repeated over and over foreign words which he did not understand, as if working a magical incantation. Hearing that secret fraternities existed at Washington College, Wood resolved to join one. |
| During the Civil War, the college fraternity system had completely died out in the South. Several fraternities had existed at Washington College before the war, in spite of college regulations against them. As the new college president Lee removed the regulations against secret organizations. Immediately thereafter, in the fall of 1865, Phi Kappa Psi and Beta Theta Pi quickly re-established their chapters on the Washington College campus. They were joined in November 1865 by Alpha Tau Omega -- a new fraternity that had been founded at the nearby Virginia Military Institute. |
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Because he lived over a mile out in the country from the college, Wood spent much of his time between classes loafing in the room of William Archibald Walsh. Walsh, who was from Richmond, Virginia, lived in the southernmost room of the old South Dormitory. William Nelson Scott frequently met Wood in Walsh's room, and the three became friends. |
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| On 21 December 1865, at a supper in Walsh's room, that was attended by Walsh, James Ward Wood and William Nelson Scott, Wood rose and proposed a toast to "the two Williams." Either at that time or at some later date, while sitting in Walsh's room, Wood suggested to William Nelson Scott that they organize a new fraternity. Wood included Walsh in the idea as well as Scott's younger brother, Stanhope McClelland Scott, who entered Washington College in January 1866. Some time between late December 1865, and early spring of 1866, the four of them swore together in the founding of the Phi Kappa Chi Fraternity |
 Stanhope McClelland Scott |
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The other fraternities looked scornfully upon the appearance of a new secret society on campus, and members of Phi Kappa Psi became especially perturbed at Wood's use of a name, Phi Kappa Chi, so similar to their own. Consequently, some time in the early months of 1866, Phi Kappa Psi sent Harry Estill to ask Wood to change the name of the new organization. To this proposal Wood consented, and on 9 April 1866, the group re-emerged as the Kappa Alpha Fraternity. William Mason Bell, from Lexington, Virginia became the first initiate after the four founders, and by June 1866, six others had joined the new society. |
| Perhaps the most significant event in the early history of the Kappa Alpha fraternity occurred on 17 October 1866, when the society initiated Samuel Zenas Ammen of Lincastle, Virginia. Although Wood had created Kappa Alpha, the task of giving substance to the small student group at Washington College yet remained. It was Ammen who gave the fraternity its particular emphasis. |  |
| Samuel Zenas Ammen served in the Confederate Army and spent the first year after the war at Botetourt Male Academy, a classical preparatory school at Fincastle, Virginia. During his three years at Washington College, from 1866 to 1869, Ammen earned a master's degree, graduating with honors and excelling in Greek and Latin. He also founded the Washington College student publication, The Collegian. |
| Ammen, having become a Master Mason in 1865 in Fincastle, Virginia, was accustomed to a fully developed fraternal organization with highly involved initiatory rite. He immediately recognized the shallowness of Wood's ritual and knew that the fraternity had little to offer in the realm of the esoteric to prospective members of even slight sophistication. Ammen later wrote that, "It certainly lacked all at first entrance - bare walls, bare proceedings, barrenness of purpose. It was a farce, an empty thing." "Our belongings were one wooden bench for the non-official members, one sword, one minute book and one manuscript ritual" |
| With the aid of speeches and essays read in chapter meeting and from his own reading in the classics and in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century romantic literature, Samuel Zenas Ammen derived the new ceremony. As a result of his work, Kappa Alpha evolved from a small association of college students to an Order of Christian Knights, pledged to high ideals of character and honor, religious in feeling, military in organization, and committed to protect the virtue of pure womanhood. Thus, the boys who constituted the small struggling student society, could marvel at the new, lofty attributes of their organization, for within the corpus of the new fraternity, Ammen had entrenched the Southern myth of chivalry. |
| From such humble beginnings, and with the continued efforts of Ammen and many other initiates, Kappa Alpha Order has become the organization we know today. |
This article has been adapted from Gary Thomas Scott's book, The Kappa Alpha Order, 1865 - 1987.
This fine book has much more to offer, and may be ordered in the Kappa Alpha Bookstore.
