San Diego Sigma Chi Alumni Chapter | The Seven Founders of Sigma Chi

The seven young men who founded Sigma Chi were not ordinary men.  They were men of vision, men of courage, men of action. They envisioned something new in fraternities.

Prior to Sigma Chi's birth, fraternities were based on the proposition that friendships are best formed by men of like minds, talents, and personalities.  Our founders, however, believed that true brotherhood could prosper only when men of unlike minds, talents, and personalities banded themselves together under a common set of ideals.  It was on this precept that Sigma Chi was begun. 

Knowledge of the exemplary lives led by these men is a requisite to gaining an understanding of their ideals and the tremendous contribution they made to our Fraternity.

Thomas Cowan Bell

"the qualities of learning”

Thomas Cowan Bell was born near Dayton, Ohio, and was 23 years old at the time of Sigma Chi's founding. His rooming place at Oxford with his aunt, Mrs. Lizzie Davis, became informally known as “the first chapter home of Sigma Chi.” All of the members of Alpha chapter either moved into the house or into the immediate neighborhood and all ate at her well-furnished table.

Bell is best remembered for his exemplification of the qualities of learning and friendship. He instilled an atmosphere of friendship in the Fraternity and had, according to Runkle, “an expression on his face that made one instinctively reach for his hand. He was one of the kindly and lovable sort, and came into the Sigma Chi movement naturally. He was good hearted, believed in securing the good things of life and immediately dividing the same with his companions. He was as full of enthusiasm as a crusader. Naturally he was a leader and teacher of men. He was ambitious, but in no way disposed to push his aspirations at the expense of his fellows. He and Cooper, in thought and sympathy and in the deep foundations of their being, were much the same sort of men, though in outward expression of the inward character they differed widely.”

Graduating in 1857, he started on his life's work of teaching. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, he enlisted in the Union Army, where he won a commission and received high commendation at the Battle of Murfreesboro. He rose to lieutenant colonel, although he preferred to be called “Major Bell.”

Following the war, he returned to a career in education. He served as superintendent of schools in Nobles County, Minn.; county recorder of deeds and editor/publisher of a local newspaper; and as principal and president of several preparatory and collegiate institutions in the western United States.

He entered the Chapter Eternal in 1919, the day after attending a Sigma Chi Initiation at Alpha Beta Chapter at the University of California-Berkeley. He is buried in the Presidio in San Francisco, where in 1933 the Fraternity dedicated the final Founders' memorial monument to him.

James Parks Caldwell

“true to principle”

James Parks Caldwell, born in Monroe, Ohio, was just 14 years old when he helped launch Sigma Chi. By the time he was 13, his progress through academic courses, including Latin and advanced math, caused the principal of the local academy to remark that the boy had covered everything that could be offered there, and he entered Miami University apparently with advanced credits.

Caldwell is best remembered for his spirit of youth and for bringing an element of creative genius. According to Runkle, “Jimmie Caldwell was born with a wonderful brain and a strangely sensitive and delicate organization. He was from his childhood one of the most lovable of God's creations. Strong men who have become hardened to tender feeling and sympathetic sentiment, remember and love him. Somehow, he seemed closely akin to all of us. I roomed and cared for him for more than a year. Our holidays were spent in the fields and along the streams, one of us carrying a gun, or fishing rod, but Caldwell his copy of Poe or his Shakespeare. His contributions, essays, poems, plays and stories read in the literary hall, in the chapter meetings and on Saturdays before the whole corps of students, were the most remarkable productions that I ever heard. Few of us escaped the pointed witticisms that flowed from his pen, or ever lost the nicknames that he gave us in his dramas. He never seemed to study as other boys. What he knew appeared to be his intuitively. He wrote Latin and Greek poetry, and he was more widely versed in literature, and more accurate in his knowledge, than any other student in the college. He left the university with the respect and the wholehearted affection of every soul from president to janitor.”

He graduated Miami University soon after his sixteenth birthday. Following college he practiced law in Ohio, and began a career as an educator in Mississippi. He enlisted in the Confederate army, and during the Civil War, he was captured and taken prisoner. He rejected an offer of freedom on condition that he renounce allegiance to the Confederacy, even though it came from a northern soldier who loved him as a brother.

Following the war, he returned to Mississippi and was admitted to the bar. He remained a bachelor and traveled frequently, writing as a journalist and practicing law. His death came in 1912, at Biloxi, where in his room were found the latest issues of The Sigma Chi Quarterly. He is buried in Biloxi Cemetery.