The collection is open for research.
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Researchers wishing to cite this collection should include the following information: [item], [box], [folder], Records of the Pittsylvania Club, 1893-1909, RG 31/1/13, Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va.
The Records of the Pittsylvania Club were acquired by Special Collections and University Archives prior to 2019.
The processing, arrangement, and description of the Records of the Pittsylvania Club was completed in August 2022.
The Pittsylvania Club was founded in 1894 at Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, and appears in The Bugle from 1895 to 1908. The club was a Sectional Club for people from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. The club may have disbanded in 1909.
The club and its officers have become a source of controversy in the 20th and 21st centuries. One of its "High Arch Fiends" was Claudius Lee, who later became a long-serving faculty member at the university. Honoring Lee's service, a residence hall bearing his name was built in the late 1960s. In recent years, however, Lee's campus reputation has been tarnished by information gleaned from the 1896 Bugle, of which Lee served as editor. Within the annual's "organizations" section is a page devoted to the K. K. K., naming Lee as the "father of terror." Lee is also listed as an "arch fiend" in the Pittsylvania Club, whose logo is of the lynching a Black man hanging from a tree and whose motto is "Hang 'Em". No evidence of campus Klan activity has been found, however, and an investigation has concluded that the pages are racist jokes perpetrated by young men in a nineteenth-century military school dominated by white males. There seems to be no direct evidence in the Records of the Pittsylvania Club relating to the yearbook. Several times in recent years, these pages have sparked controversy and led to demands that Lee Hall be re-named. After a petition received over 10,000 signatures in 2020, Lee Hall was renamed Hoge Hall in August of that year.
This collection contains a minute book belonging to the Pittsylvania Club at Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College. The minutes primarily include information about the election of new members and the election of officers. The minute book contains the minutes for the club from 1893 to 1909. No direct discussion of the club's racist imagery in the 1896 yearbook was discovered in the collection during processing.
The guide to the Records of the Pittsylvania Club by Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech, is licensed under a CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/).