Ross Bernard “Mac” McElroy, 1890-1972, graduated from high school in Spokane, WA in 1909 and enrolled at Washington State College that fall. He graduated from WSC in 1913 with a B.S. in Engineering. While at WSC, he was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity, the Crimson Circle, the student branch of AIEE, the baseball team (he played third base and was captain his senior year), and was on the Evergreen staff.
While on campus, McElroy dated Harriet Elizabeth Taylor, 1891-1974, of Waitsburg, also WSC class of 1913 (though it appears she did not attend her final year and so never graduated), who was a member of the Theta Kappa sorority. Ross and Harriet were married on October 22nd, 1913.
Washington State College’s Kappa Sigma fraternity dates to 1906 under the name Kappa Theta, and became affiliated with Kappa Sigma in 1909 as the college’s first nationally affiliated fraternity. It occupied the former Walter Davis home in Pullman until a newly built house opened for the 1911 school year.
The photographs primarily document fraternity (specifically Kappa Sigma) life on the Washington State College campus during the years 1909-1913. They were collected by student Ross McElroy.
Images tend to be either postcards printed by Pullman area studios, notably Artopho, Robert Burns, and Monroe Studios, or self-developed photographs.
Photographs are often unidentified and/or undated. One telltale date indicator is the fraternity’s move from a residential home to a newly built chapter house, which occurred in 1911.
The materials are arranged in an alphabetical subject-based order.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions may apply.
[Item description]
Ross McElroy Washington State College Photographs, 1909-1913 (PC 187)
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
The materials in this collection were purchased by the Washington State university Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections from a Wilder, ID resident in November, 2019 and retained as UPC2019-08. The provenance is unclear, but it appears that the seller purchased the materials in scrapbook form and then dismantled it so as to sell the individual images on EBay, cutting off the image edges where the scrapbook paper remained attached. As a result, this collection does not includes sports-related images (or other images that the seller thought would sell individually) which were part of the original scrapbook.
The collection was reorganized into a subject-based organizational system during processing, as no apparent original order remained.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.