Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. It is the oldest senior class for landed society at Yale.
The society's alumni organization, which owns the society's real property and oversees the organization, is the Russell Trust Association, named for William Huntington Russell, who co-founded Skull and Bones with classmate Alphonso Taft. The Russell Trust was founded by Russell and Daniel Coit Gilman, member of Skull and Bones and later president of the University of California, first president of Johns Hopkins University, and the founding president of the Carnegie Institution.
The society is known informally as "Bones", and members are known as "Bonesmen".]
History
Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 after a dispute among Yale's debating societies, Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and the Calliopean Society, over that season's Phi Beta Kappa awards; its original name was "the Order of Skull and Bones.
The only chapter of Skull and Bones created outside Yale was a chapter at Wesleyan University in 1870. That chapter, the Beta of Skull and Bones, became independent in 1872 in a dispute about control over creating additional chapters; the Beta Chapter reconstituted itself as Theta Nu Epsilon.
The first extended description of Skull and Bones, published in 1871 by Lyman Bagg in his book Four Years at Yale, noted that "the mystery now attending its existence forms the one great enigma which college gossip never tires of discussing. Brooks Mather Kelley attributed the secrecy of Yale senior societies to the fact that underclassmen members of freshman, sophomore, and junior class societies remained on campus following their membership, while seniors naturally left.
Deer Island lodge.
Skull and Bones owns an island in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York named Deer Island:
The 40 acre retreat is intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to "get together and rekindle old friendships." A century ago the island sported tennis courts and its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry bushes. Catboats waited on the lake. Stewards catered elegant meals. Although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island, the place leaves something to be desired. "Now it is just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings," a patriarch sighs. "It's basically ruins." Another Bonesman says that to call the island "rustic" would be to glorify it. "It's a dump, but it's beautiful."
—Alexandra Robbins, TheAtlantic.com
Once the pinnacle of the college's social system, the society remained central to campus life through the 1950s, but since then some say it has lost much of its luster.
