Hamilton Gazetteer / Entities / Samuel Eells

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person

Overview

Samuel Eells (1810–1838) was a member of Hamilton College’s Class of 1832 who achieved lasting historical significance as the founder of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. Entering Hamilton in the fall of 1827 from Westmoreland, New York, Eells was dissatisfied with the bitter rivalry between the two existing literary societies on campus and conceived a plan for a new type of organization emphasizing literary cultivation. In the spring of 1831, he held the first meeting of charter members in his room in Kirkland Hall; the fraternity was formally established the following year. At the 1832 Commencement, Eells served as class valedictorian.

After graduation, Eells immediately expanded the organization: in 1833 he founded the second chapter of Alpha Delta Phi at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, making it the third fraternity in American history to spread beyond a single campus. He also preached at the Westmoreland Congregational Church, an early point of contact between Hamilton College and that community. He died young, in 1838. His legacy at Hamilton was cemented by the construction of the Alpha Delta Phi Memorial Hall in 1876, named in his honor, which served as the fraternity’s home on the Hill.

Relevance to Research

Eells is one of the most historically significant alumni from Hamilton’s early decades, being the acknowledged founder of what became a major national fraternity. He appears in the corpus repeatedly across nearly a century of student press coverage — from catalog listings in 1830–31 to retrospective Spectator pieces into the 1950s. His founding of Alpha Delta Phi on the Hamilton campus places Hamilton at the origin of an important strand of American collegiate fraternal life.

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