The students were all required to be present at the daily public religious exercises, and to attend preaching  twice every Sabbath day and to recite every week in the Greek Testament. [7e]

Like other colleges of its day its curriculum provided a classical education including Latin and Greek literature, rhetoric, et cetera, plus some mathematics, science, and history. In addition to the classics, at least eight textbooks were used.  The members of the Senior Class were required to deliver original orations about twice a month.

The object of such an education was "not to teach that which was peculiar to any one of the professions but to lay the foundation which was common to them all," while providing a substitute for parental superintendence. This education could be  the foundation for professional training, such as law, medicine, theology, etc. So said the influential "Yale Report of 1829" [61] which defended the classical education  in the face of growing criticism.

The Yale faculty claimed that the required discipline of the mind needed a balance among and training in each of such as reasoning, imagination, taste, eloquence, demonstrative evidence, probability, memory, and powers of invention, without allowing any one of these to dominate.  This balance, they said, could only be achieved with a variety of courses, somewhat like Jefferson College's.

Study of the dead languages, Greek and Latin, and their literature, was claimed by the historian of Jefferson College, Joseph Smith, to have superlative fitness to exercise, train and develop the mental faculties, be peculiarly adapted  to college age men, and to cultivate the imagination, and refine the taste. [25e] 

There were no controversies about Darwin's theory of evolution by natural section, because that theory had not yet been published.

Today's grading systems evidently did not exist. Students were honored for good performance and might receive free tuition. 

Campus

Shown below is the campus in a circa1850 etching. [40b]  The building on the left is West College. It was built in 1813 (razed in 1912), and served in part as dormitory. To the right is Providence Hall which was built in 1833 (razed in the 1950s). It contained the literary society halls on the upper floor. [34a]. Lots of windows made daytime lighting and cooling very energy efficient---no electric lights or air conditioning were used (or yet invented).

Campus in a late 1860's photograph [6] (Click to enlarge.)	Campus in an old tinted postcard picture [5].

Faculty

Student Housing and Life

The majority of students boarded in private families in the village and neighborhood although the college made available accommodations and eating facilities for a fee. [7d] Some lived in boarding houses, which they nicknamed "forts.".

Light at night was from candles and whale oil lamps, evidently.  (The kerosene lamp was not invented until 1853. [49i]  The first successful use of an oil drilling rig was in 1859 at Titusville, PA, for the primary purpose of obtaining oil to be distilled into kerosene. [49h])

Heat was from smoky soft coal stoves for which the students bought coal.

Dry cleaning had not yet been developed.

Writing was done without typewriters, which were not produced until the next century, and without fountain pens, which were not widely available for a few decades.

Two student organizations, the Philo and Franklin Literary Societies, were important in student life and learning, and recognized as such by the college catalogs. They had been in existence for over 50 years and were copied after similar societies at Princeton. Faculty were also members of the societies.

They met weekly and the members were required to present a translation, original essay / speech, or to debate. They were divided into three "classes" so each member had to prepare every three weeks. The topics debated or presented ranged all the way from the abolition of slavery to "Kissing" and "The Pleasure of Having a Clean Pocket Handkerchief."

The literary society objectives were the  "cultivation and promotion of science and literature, and of friendship and morality among its members" for the Philo society, and the Franklin was similar, whose motto was Scientia, Amicitia, et Virtus -- "Learning, Friendship, and Virtue"

Strict secrecy was maintained about the proceedings, constitutions, and rules for most of their existence.

The societies exercised a certain amount of control over their members. Misbehavior at meetings, or general misconduct, such as profanity, intoxication, and "acting disorderly in the streets of Canonsburg." could result in fines or expulsion.

By 1850 the societies had  handsomely furnished halls on the top floor of the main building which included  libraries, purchased over the years by the members. The libraries contained on the order of 1,000 volumes.

"Contest" between the two societies was a great event of the college year, apparently taking the place of the excitement over athletics that exists today. (There was  nothing in the way of official sports.) Representatives of the two societies presented speeches in competition, and such partisanship prevailed throughout the whole town that impartial judges had to be sought from Pittsburgh. This custom of "Contest" was first instituted at Jefferson and later spread throughout colleges everywhere.

Another less influential student organization existed. It was Societas de Inquirendo,  a religious society carried on and organized by the students, "for the consideration of the claims of mankind upon them as educated men." [34e]

Faculty opposed the secret societies (Greek letter associations, that is, fraternities), which were in some respects similar to the literary societies, on  the grounds that they had loyalties outside of the school and did not have faculty supervision. [25b]

Freemason lodges were fraternal organizations that existed at that time, although not particularly for students. Freemasonry  had existed since before the founding of the country. (George Washington was a Mason.) The Phi Psi founders were not Masons at the time of the founding, but an early leader (Tom Campbell) became one [3b].

(Principles often espoused are  "Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth". Membership requires belief in a Supreme Being, the interpretation of the term being subject to the conscience of the candidate. There are three degrees in Freemasonry, representing stages of personal development: 1. Entered Apprentice - the degree of an Initiate; 2. Fellow Craft - an intermediate degree; 3. Master Mason or Third Degree - the highest degree and necessary for participation in almost any aspect of Masonry.  Freemasonry in America faced political pressure following the disappearance of anti-Masonic agitator William Morgan in 1826 culminating in the formation of a short lived Anti-Masonic Party in 1832.)  [49e]

Olome Seminary school for girls was nearby and an object of great interest to the college boys. ("Seminary " means an institution of secondary or higher education, not a theological school.) Occasionally the boys would build a bonfire in the street to attract the girls attention. [5]

There may have been "Base Ball" games involving students as the first game involving modern rules had been played in 1845, and others were played previously. Unlikely is something like football, although in 1820 a notoriously violent related game called "ballown" was played at the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton University). ("Basket Ball" was not invented until 1891, at a YMCA in Springfield, MA, and "Volley Ball" was not invented until 1895, at a YMCA in Holyoke, MA.)

Hunting (or war) with firearms required the use of long muskets (muzzle-loading guns). (The shooter poured powder down the barrel, used leather or cloth for wadding, then seated a projectile on top of the powder charge by means of a ramrod, requiring 30 seconds between shots.)  The six-shooter, using brass cartridges, was invented some years before but did not reach large production until after 1847. [49d]

There were other activities-- "Dancing is all the go, even with the Divinity Students. None ...are too strict to prohibit a social dance--all allow it.", a student  wrote.

Music came from violins [25c], banjos, or possibly a church organ, piano or other instruments, or a music box. Neither the player piano nor the phonograph, nor the I-Pod, were yet developed. Music was distributed by printed sheets rather than by the Internet. 

Contemporary published music included songs by Stephen Foster,-
     "Oh! Susanna" (1847)
     "Old Folks at Home" (1851),
     "Massa's in de Cold Ground" (1853),
     "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853),
     "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854),

and others, such as
     "Crambambuli, Bright Source of Pleasure" (1845),
     "Jim crack corn" or "The blue tail fly" (1846),
     "The Arkansas Traveller" (1851),
     "Listen to the Mocking Bird" (1855),
     "Jingle Bells" or "The One Horse Open Sleigh" (1857),
     There's music in the air" (1857)
     "{Dixie's Land} I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land" (1860),

[2]

Digital cameras did not exist, nor did film cameras. The daguerreotype, introduced in the 1840's, was the available means of photography. Later in the century various other somewhat cumbersome photographic techniques were developed. Itinerant practitioners traveled from town to town allowing people for the first time to obtain an exact likeness for a modest cost. It would take a few minutes to produce each photograph.

(For a daguerreotype, the image was exposed directly onto a polished surface of silver-plated copper bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. The image was made visible by placing the exposed plate over a slightly heated  cup of mercury. About 1855 ambrotypes, which were less expensive , replaced Daguerreotypes in popularity. Ambrotypes were negative photographs taken on wet glass plates that appeared positive when viewed against a black background. The tintype / ferrotype process,  became popular in the 1860s due to its even lower cost and greater durability, and was much used during the Civil War. It was a minor improvement to the ambrotype, replacing the glass plate of the original process with a thin piece of black enameled, or japanned, iron.  Albumen prints were photos printed on special paper from glass negatives and became the dominant form of photographic positives from 1855 to the turn of the century.)

The social life of the College and the town was intermingled, and this led to a good deal of gaiety, with the students living as they did, scattered about among various private homes. "I have become acquainted with most of the 'Bon Ton' of the place," one student wrote. On the other hand there was antagonism between the Canonsburg-College people and the country people of the surrounding county. [34b]

There evidently was no minimum legal drinking age (MLDA), but public intoxication was severely censored by the students as well as by others.   At least one student was expelled for drunkenness. The board of the college forbade students from boarding in taverns. The temperance movement had gotten underway a couple of decades before. (Back in 1800 the business of distilling had been considered as respectable as making flour, and the use of whisky was as universal as coffee or tea later. [25d]) {Prohibition came later, in 1920, and lasted until 1933. The first MLDA in Virginia evidently was enacted in 1934. [32]}

There was some serious student fighting in the 1850's, "particularly indulged in by the hot-headed Southerners. The worst ... resulted in homicide, which occurred when a young apprentice of the town was knifed by a student in a sort of town and gown riot. The student was smuggled away by sleigh into Virginia by his influential relatives, while another student, though tried, was acquitted. In another fight between two students, one was so badly injured that the other fled for fear of the consequences." [34b] 

Books were  important, and some were written at the time that are still notable today, e.g.

• Two Years Before the Mast (1840) by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. who left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor on a voyage around Cape Horn to California and back.
• Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville described the voyage of a  whaling ship commanded by Captain Ahab, who leads his crew on a hunt for the great whale, Moby-Dick.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, Or, Life Among The Lowly (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist, about Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whose life the other characters revolve.

Important current events included the California Gold Rush (1848–1855) --one or more students entered it when they left college.[40]  Texas entered the Union in 1845 and later became a destination for one of Phi Psi's founders. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, passed by the U. S. Congress (as part of the Compromise of 1850), set fines and imprisonment penalties for any official who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave and for any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter. [49f]

Pittsburgh

Excursions to Pittsburgh, or stops there when traveling, would provide shopping and entertainment possibilities. (It was  3 hours or so away.) Movies were not yet invented and not even vaudeville (traveling variety acts) was yet developed. Minstrel shows, a Northern institution, were popular entertainment. These were music and comedy shows by mostly white men in blackface. (After the Civil War more colored men in blackface appeared.) [49a][49k]

Pittsburgh population in 1850 was 44,642 White and 1,959 Free Colored. It was and is built on the land between the confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers and the surrounding hills,  A fire five years before, in 1845, had destroyed most of the buildings (over 1,000), so those that were there in 1850 were largely new. [1][49l]

Jewelers in Pittsburgh made the first Phi Psi badges.

Canonsburg

Locale

Canonsburg is a borough 18 miles southwest of Pittsburgh on Chartiers Creek. The 1850 U.S. Census population figures were 575 Whites and 52 Free Colored. [47] (Under Pennsylvania law, there are four types of incorporated municipalities: cities, boroughs, townships, and  towns.) Canonsburg is located in Washington County and was incorporated in 1802. It is in a rich coal district, and some of the town's work force may have worked in local coal mines.  | Current topographic map | 1850 Street map |

"Fort Armstrong"  boarding house, {photo1900} {site of the founding of the Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity in 1848} [40] [6]	Briceland's Tavern, a stone building that was a  popular meeting place and banquet venue [6]

Transportation and Communication

The railway did not come through Canonsburg until after the college left in 1868.

If a student reached  Pittsburgh by stage coach or horse he could travel by steamer up the Ohio river, and possibly transfer to a canal boat,  assuming a canal headed toward his destination. (This was near the end of the 1790-1860 "Canal Era" in the U.S.)  The canal boats were pulled by a couple of  horses or mules, who walked along a towpath led by a driver, while another man steered the boat. There were locks along the way which added delays.

Typical canal towpath [20]

 (Seventeen years before, when two boys were coming to Jefferson from Carolina their father bought them two horses and they rode all the way north to Canonsburg, sold the horses, then four years later bought two more to return the 450 or so miles home. [34c])

Telegraph communication arrived in Canonsburg about 1850, and they had a good operator there so a student "could make the subtle fluid carry his thoughts hundreds of miles away."[37]  (Practical telephones did not arrive for 50 years, and radio broadcasting was not developed until about 1920.)

Local transportation was by foot, horseback, wagon, carriage, horse and buggy, or sleigh---mostly by foot, considering that the town was only six blocks long.  A carriage is  a horse drawn, four-wheeled, vehicle with leaf springs. The horse and buggy is a simple two-person carriage drawn by one or two horses. The people of Canonsburg "are exceedingly wealthy, have fine horses, carriages,".--- student McLean White wrote home in 1849. The bicycle was not yet developed. (The modern bike with chain drive, pneumatic tires, and freewheeling appeared about forty years later -- 1890).

Rockaway Coupe carriage, 1830-c.1900, 4 passengers,  enclosed in glass [23]	Four passenger sleigh c.1895 [21]

Horse kicks, runaway horses, and horse manure were hazards of the day.  A gentleman would always walk on the street side of a sidewalk when accompanying a lady.

There were no street lights.

Medicine, Sanitation, and the Epidemic of 1851

The Germ Theory of Disease had a long development period and was not prevalent in 1850. Around 1680 Microorganisms were first observed, by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutchman who developed  the microscope. In 1844, the Italian Agostino Bassi stated the idea that not only animal (insect), but also human diseases are caused by other living microorganisms. Robert Koch was the first scientist to devise a series of proofs used to verify the Germ Theory of Disease. Koch's Postulates were first used in 1875. [49g]

The miasmatic theory of disease was widely believed through the mid-1800's; it held that diseases such as cholera were caused by a miasma, a noxious form of "bad air." Miasma was a poisonous vapor or mist that is filled with particles from decomposed matter (miasmata) that could cause illnesses and had a foul smell. This theory encouraged cleanliness, but some doctors still did not wash their hands between patients---they believed that the miasmata were only airborne. [49j]

Along this line, student McLean White wrote  that he lived in a part of town "which is open and healthy." He added that "the place where it was worst is at the Coll. buildings, where they live without regard to any cleanliness."

X-Rays were not discovered until about 50 years later.

Indoor plumbing was not yet available, privies (outhouses) and chamber pots were in use. A "honey-dipper" or "night soil man" provided an essential service---no privy pit could be dug so deep that it did not need to be cleaned out from time to time. Such a man used bucket and a "honey wagon," (a  horse drawn wagon carrying a tank of liquid manure or sewage) sometimes at night, working  when there was a good wind in order not to cause evil smells. Many times he scattered the contents all over the town.) [22]

Water was obtained from wells. Washstands were used for washing, and of course a straight razor for shaving. (The safety razor was first developed in 1875. [49m])

Manufactured bar soap would not be available until later in the century. (Soap would likely have been made locally by boiling potash  (or "potash lye", KOH, in contrast to "soda lye", NaOH), obtained by pouring water through ashes, with rendered fat, obtained by boiling water and animal fat together and letting the fat rise and cool. Salt would be added if hard rather than soft soap was wanted.) [49n] [19]

(Later, around 1900, sewers, water and gas lines, electric and telephone wires were put in Canonsburg. [5]

An epidemic occurred in the winter of 1851, probably typhoid or influenza. The season of the year suggests influenza, but the severity suggests typhoid. Typhoid fever is an illness caused by a bacterium and  is transmitted by ingestion of food or water contaminated with feces from an infected person. Treatment now is with modern antibiotics (discovered in 1928). When untreated, typhoid fever persists for three weeks to a month and death may occur in  10% or more cases. [49o] One professor died and one was sick in bed. The classes thinned out more than half---the missing students were ill or had left college for fear of the disease. One student died, and there was talk of suspending the session. Apparently no college infirmary or town hospital was available, and the students had to take care of each other in their rooms.

The Founders of Phi Kappa Psi

Charles Page Thomas Moore was born  in Virginia, on February 8, 1831, the son of gentry. His mother died when he was two and his father when he was thirteen, so he was brought up by a paternal uncle, Colonel George Moore, on a riverine estate in Mason County, of over 1,000 acres and complete with slaves. After schooling under  private tutors for three years in Pike County, Ohio, at the home of Hon. John I. VanMeter with the VanMeter boys and other boys of the rural neighborhood as co-students, and then at Marshall Academy in Huntington, (West) Virginia, Moore entered Jefferson College 1851 with the intention of becoming an attorney. [14d] Letterman was a Sophomore at that time.

Moore served as president of the association the first year. As soon as he and Letterman had gotten Phi Kappa Psi well started, in March 1853, Moore left Letterman to preside over their small band of brothers, and  transferred to Union College in New York state with the express purpose of establishing a second chapter, as he completed a classical, political-science, and foreign-language course and graduated. He found the situation not satisfactory for a new chapter, and when he graduated from Union in June, 1853 {?}, he  went on from there to law school at the University of Virginia.

He was eager to expand the fraternity "to make the Phi Kappa Psi not only the most powerful, but the 'maximus et optimus'" (biggest and best), and he worked hard to do so. He succeeded in forming the second chapter of the Fraternity, Virginia Alpha .March 1854 he wrote regarding Virginia Alpha, "We know full well there can be no unanimity where there are unpleasant feelings, and to avoid giving birth to such feelings we have a care to use no rough language, no teasing, no rough jokes to one another; hence no quarrels arise, and consequently we love one another and are loved by all who know us. What a happy effect!" [14e]

All his life he was a broad-church Episcopalian.

{He was elected county Prosecuting Attorney and a judge of  the state  Supreme Court. When he was fifty, after eleven years on the state’s Supreme Court, as heir to his uncle’s large estate, Moore retired to River View in Mason County, West Virginia,  He died at the age of seventy-three and was laid to rest in a hillside cemetery at Gallipolis Ferry, West Virginia in the vicinity of his home estate. His 4 children were daughters. Three grandsons were Phi Psis at West Virginia Alpha. (Their surnames were Bland.) [43]}

William Henry Letterman was born  in the town where the college was located, Canonsburg, on August 12, 1832. His family name was originally Letherman. He grew up in comfortable circumstances which were reduced by the early death of his physician father when he was twelve. He was schooled just down the hill from the family home at the Jefferson College's preparatory department, the Jefferson Academy.

He then went on to the College where his older brothers, Jonathan Jr. and Craig Ritchie, both had  graduated in 1845. He continued to live with his widowed mother.

His older brother Jonathan had been a member of an existing society, Beta Theta Pi [39], but William chose to found a new national fraternity with Moore.

In 1853, Letterman entered Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, entrusting the future of Phi Kappa Psi to the fifteen chapter members, the best remembered of whom was Thomas Cochran Campbell.

In April 1854 he advised against being in too much of a hurry, too eager for power,  and advised the criteria for new members,  "First, moral principle... Two, let talent and ambition ... be another requisite."

It was not until he as nearly forty that  he asked to be baptized and then confirmed in the Presbyterian Church and  formally became a Christian, having withstood the urgings of his own family and the more insistent pressures of his hometown and college.

{He earned his MD degree, practiced, and went to Europe for clinics in Berlin and Vienna. He bought coal lands in WV for land firms in Boston, Baltimore, and New York. He became a Mason in Baltimore in 1868.  He married at 43.  Like his father and brother who died in early middle age, Letterman suffered from a heart condition, and he died of it in Duffau, Texas, where he is buried, at 48 years of age. [43]  In Duffau he helped found the county medical association and a Masonic Lodge. Today, in 2007,  his great-grandson Gordon Letterman is an active member of  Phi Kappa Psi}