Collection: Alpha Sigma Phi
Louis Manigault, Alpha Sigma Phi’s principal Founder, and Stephen Ormsby Rhea, one of the co-founders, first met and became friends at St. Paul’s College, a preparatory school for boys in Flushing Meadows, New York. Rhea was two years older and had already spent a year at St. Paul’s when Manigault entered. There they joined a local fraternity, the Phi Theta Kappa Society. Both Manigault and Rhea arrived to enter the freshman class at Yale in the fall of 1845, and neither of the men chose to join a freshman society.
Louis Manigault found the attitude of the members of the sole sophomore society, Kappa Sigma Theta, toward their fellow students condescending and obnoxious. As a freshman, he had visions of starting a rival sophomore fraternity. For his freshman year, Louis Manigault lived in a college boarding house that sat at the intersection of Temple and Chapel Street, overlooking the green and college buildings on the other side. The boarding house gave Manigault the privacy and freedom to concentrate on planning the creation of Alpha Sigma Phi. He did not hide his disdain of Kappa Sigma Theta writing:
