days of old
Coming Up Roses On a warm June afternoon in 1889, Leila McKee, principal of
History courtesy of Stephen Gordon ’75 MA ’81, administrator of the McGuffey House and Museum, and Beta Theta Pi, whose national headquarters is in Oxford.
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miamian magazine
Western Female Seminary, better known these days as Western College for Women, hosted a reception to recognize Miami University’s Beta Theta Pi graduating seniors. (Leila had ties to the fraternity as her longtime Beta sweetheart, John Young Craft, died in 1878 while an undergraduate at Centre College. She wore his Beta badge for years.) The event also marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of the fraternity at Miami. At the appointed time, Henrietta McGuffey Hepburn — the daughter of William Holmes McGuffey, a professor at Miami (1826-1836) when his first eclectic readers were published, and wife of Andrew D. Hepburn, Miami professor of English Language and Literature — stood to make a much-anticipated proclamation. According to the June 1889 Miami Student newspaper, “The most pleasing event of the day was when Mrs. Dr. Hepburn arose from the banquet table and announced that the fraternity had chosen a floral emblem. Mrs. Hepburn, her daughter Miss Etta Hepburn, and Miss McKee had chosen it.” They had selected an old-fashioned climbing rose from a bush that grew on the seminary’s front porch, a building later named Peabody Hall (pictured left). Believed to have been a Queen of the Prairie, the pink flower was presented to Beta founders John Knox, Miami Class of 1839, and Samuel Marshall, Miami Class of 1840, who were “on hand for the grand affair.” Later that fall, Beta’s 50th General Convention officially adopted Queen of the Prairie as the society’s representative flower, believed to be the first such notion of any fraternity. Today, the only known specimens of this variety in Oxford can be seen on the west wall of the McGuffey House and Museum, on campus at the corner of Spring and Oak (pictured right). Two bushes were planted along the wall in October 2015 with funds donated by Ed and Sue Jones in memory of Sue’s mother, Eva M. Clement. Sue is a former professor in the School of Education and a docent at the Miami University Art Museum and the McGuffey House and Museum. Her husband, Ed, is a Wichita State Beta and professor emeritus of Miami’s Department of Teacher Education.