THE FOGARTYS OF KILKENNY AND CHARLESTON

 

The story of an American college fraternity may not seem a likely place for Irish influence, yet in the case of Pi Kappa Phi, there is not only an Irish connection and a link to the College of Charleston, but also an intereting background story that illuminates the history of immigration in Charleston in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

 

Simon Fogarty Jr., who, at the age of seventeen, founded the fraternity in 1904 with two others, was born in Charleston, South Carolina on June 7th. 1887, the fourth child in a family of six born to Simon Fogarty Sr. and his wife Julia (Margaretta), nee Wall.

 

The senior Fogarty had arrived in Charleston at the age of ten with his widowed mother Anastasia (nee Hogan), then on her early fifties (she was born in 1798) and three siblings. They were the remainder of a family that at one time had numbered twelve in total, all of them born in Ireland and living, before their departure for America, on the family small-holding at Rathamacan near Tullaroan in north-west county Kilkenny. 

 

Simon Sr.'s older sister Ann and brother William had both died young; his father, John (then aged fifty), and a sister Mary (aged eleven) had both died in Ireland in 1846 at the beginning of the Famine era that would cause unprecedented hardship, and result in the family’s eviction from their land.

 

Anastasia and five of her six surviving children (one child remained in Ireland to act as housekeeper to a priest uncle) emigrated to the United States in 1852, together with her sister Margaret Kavanagh (nee Hogan), also seemingly a widow with children. They settled initially in Albany. The oldest girls, Catherine and Elizabeth, twins of twenty-one years, stayed on in the New York state capital and married there; the Kavanaghs moved on to settle in Missouri and Illinois.

 

The remainder of the Fogarty family soon moved to Charleston SC: in addition to Anastasia, they were Philip (then aged eighteen), Anna (then aged twelve) and Simon (then aged ten). The reason for their selection of Charleston is not obvious, but they may have had some family connections in the city (several Charleston-based Hogans occur in the Fogarty story in the following years.

 

The eldest sibling, Philip Fogarty, now aged twenty, embarked on a career in the retail trade, eventually partnering – as Skehan and Fogarty – with Michael Skehan, a grocer in business at the corner of Queen and State Streets. Philip married Catherine Hogan, possibly a relative, and by 1860 had opened a cotton brokerage, possibly in conjunction initially with an in-law, Robert Hogan who was located at 3 Vendue Range, and later with operations at Kerr's Wharf. 

His other locations, primarily residences, were at 49 Wentworth Street (1880), I Trapman Street (1889), and finally 112 Meeting Street (1890); the location in Trapman Street, built in the 1850s, is sometimes credited to a 'Dr. Simon Fogarty' but that must surely be a confusion with the later occupant). 

 

It is probable that Simon Fogarty found his early employment through his brother's involvement in the grocery or cotton businesses. The Civil War affected the family in that Simon Fogarty, then aged 23, enlisted in the Confederate forces (Company F, 1 Regiment) in 1863 but within two months was designated as 'absent without leave'. For some years in the 1860s, the family lived at Centreville in Anderson Co., where the household grew to include (in addition to his mother) his widowed sister Elizabeth Butler (her husband John had died in 1866) and her daughter Ella, late of Albany. 

 

Simon took his oath of allegiance to the Federal Government in 1865 and became a US citizen in 1868.  The family were back in Charleston by the time his mother died in 1870, aged seventy-two. In the same year, Philip's wife Catherine died in a train wreck, when the train she and at least some of her family were travelling on plunged into a twenty-five foot ravine when the trestlework gave way (their one surviving child, a daughter, was later herself widowed at the age of twenty-nine).

 

Julia, the sister who had remained in Ireland as a housekeeper to a priest uncle, seems to have joined the family in Charleston after the priest's death in the same year. Another sister, Anna, had married James Quale and settled in Charleston, where she eventually had a family of eight children.

 

By the late 1870s Simon had established a foothold in the business community, having married Julia (Margaretta) Wall, the daughter of Patrick Wall and his wife Catherine (nee Dooley), both of them also Kilkenny-born immigrants.

 

Simon and Julia set up home and a small retail outlet at 96 Broad Street before moving to 90 Broad Street where they operated a grocery store and saloon. It is probable that Simon Fogarty Jr. was born at No. 96, but moved to 90 as a very young child.

 

In 1900, Simon Jr.'s uncle Philip, who had prospered as a merchant and served as a member of the County Commission, died at the age of seventy.

Simon Fogarty Sr. is stated as having retired from active participation in the business at 90 Broad at about this time. He had by now a family of six, having lost two others to early deaths. The oldest, John, was twenty one; the youngest, William, was ten; Simon Jr. was thirteen.

 

In 1902, Simon Jr. had joined the approximately seventy others – all male, over half of them from Charleston and all from South Carolina – who were then enrolled in the College of Charleston. In 1904, as a junior aged seventeen, he had decided with his friends Andrew Kroeg Jr., son of an insurance broker and a senior at age 19, and Lawrence Mixson, son of a seedsman and a 16-year-old sophomore, that a new fraternity – initially termed a 'non-fraternity' – was needed to compete with the entrenched fraternity groups who were running a controlled slate of candidates in the elections for officers of the college's literary society.

 

Though their efforts were not successful, they received enough encouragement to launch plans for their own fully-fledged fraternity, and on December 10 1904, they and a group of friends – including Simon's younger brother James – met at the Fogarty home to plan the launch.

 

Simon Fogarty was very much involved in the new fraternity's early decisions –he designed the brotherhood's pin and the secret grip and contributed to the drafting of the its ritual with Harry Mixson and a classical scholar, A. Pelzer Wagener, who had also attended the inaugural meeting, and chosen the name Pi Kappa Phi. The others involved in the first meeting were Thomas Mossiman and Teddy Kelley.  

 

Simon Fogarty did not stay around to supervise the development of the new organisation. After graduating from the College of Charleston, he attended the Universities of Tennessee, Michigan and New York, where he received a Master's Degree in Education.

 

Andrew Kroeg was more closely involved, becoming the chapter's first head, and drafting the constitution, despite a growing opposition to fraternities in the state that eventually resulted in their being banned for a time. After he qualified as a lawyer, he returned to Charleston, set up a law practice and married Oliveros Witsell and had two children. In 1922, at the age of 37, he died, and his passing was followed in 1924 by that of his his wife, aged 36.

 

In the latter year, Pi Kappa Phi established an office at 39 Broad Street, Charleston (in the building where Andrew Kroeg had practised law) and employed an executive secretary.

 

Simon Fogarty had by now returned to Charleston, where he began a career as a teacher, then a principal, in elementary schools in the area for twenty five years. He married Mary Eugenia Reid, daughter of Edward Eugene Reid and his wife Sarah Pheobe (nee Legare), members of a prominent Episcopal family in Charleston and set up house in a recently completed residence at 151 Moultrie Street.

 

The Pi Kappa Phi organisation he helped to found flourished from its Charleston base over the next half-century, establishing chapters across the U.S.; in 1975 it moved its headquarters to the Charlotte area of North Carolina, where, except for a brief return to Charleston, it has remained.

 

Simon Fogarty became Chief US Probation Officer for the Eastern District of South Carolina in 1943 and occupied the position until his retirement in 1957. His friend Larry Mixson, who had succeeded his father as president of the family's Charleston-based seed company, died in 1962. Simon himself died in 1966 at the age of seventy-nine.

 

Simon's wife, Mary Eugenia Reid Fogarty, died in 1973. Of their three children, a son Simon III, was a Clemson University graduate and engineer who died in Florida in 1989; a daughter Elizabeth, who graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, worked as a librarian in the Charleston County Public Library service until her retirement, and died in 1998; and a daughter Mary Ellen, the only member of the family to graduate from the College of Charleston (she took a BA degree in classical languages) married Laurence Powers, the noted Charleston-born physicist, and died in 2005.

 

Today the organisation founded in the Fogarty family home over 110 years ago can boast an impressive administrative building in the Ayrsley suburb of Charlotte, and a claim to be 'America's leading fraternity'. It has the participation and support of over 100,000 fraternity members organised in almost 150 chapters spread across 38 states.