National History
Longwood College, in Farmville, Va., was the first institution of higher learning in Virginia to admit women for collegiate study. Naturally, it attracted superior students, many of them daughters of college professors already familiar with the fraternity idea.

Among the students in the fall term of 1901 were five women who had become very good friends. Attractive, vivacious, and intelligent, they had been rushed and bid by the existing sororities. However, if they accepted these bids, it would mean that the five would not be sorority sisters.


Virginia Boyd Noell, Juliette Hundley Gilliam, Calva Watson Wooton, Louise Cox Carper, and Mary Williamson Hundley.

On November 15, 1901, a new sorority was organized and named Alpha Sigma Alpha. As stated in the charter, "The purpose of the association shall be to cultivate friendship among its members, and in every way to create pure and elevating sentiments, to perform such deeds and to mould such opinions as will tend to elevate and ennoble womanhood in the world."

BACK