A cadets’ lodge of E Clampus Vitus at Georgetown, Kentucky, in November 1847: the earliest record of the order in Kentucky, from William Preston Johnston’s journal

The record

1. William Preston Johnston, journal, 15 November 1847, in Arthur Marvin Shaw, ed., “Student Life at Western Military Institute: William Preston Johnston’s Journal, 1847–1848,” Filson Club History Quarterly 18 (1944), pp. 79–108, at p. 83

   “Started a lodge of [the] Eclampsus Vitus. Took in about a dozen members.”

   The Filson Historical Society, Louisville · See the record

2. Johnston’s own note to the same entry, ibid., p. 83

   “The E. V. a mock society, started by me to retaliate the attempts at practical jokings on me. … Prof. Hopkins wished to know the object of it. I told him quizzically “charitable.””; the initiation fee was “Nothing”; the professor “levelled a regulation against it; but in the meantime I had had my revenge on the jokers.”

   The Filson Historical Society, Louisville · See the record

3. The editor’s note on the text, ibid., p. 81, n. 9

   The text printed “is a version which the author made from the original one some years after it was written.”

   The Filson Historical Society, Louisville · See the record

What it changes

The order’s earliest Kentucky record moves from Bardstown in October 1852 to Georgetown in November 1847, and the order is shown, for the first time, at a school: a mock society founded by a cadet to turn the tables on the pranksters who had played on him, with sixty initiated in a week. Kentucky joins Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania as a state where the order is found by 1847, and here the entry is dated to the day.

Limits

The journal is known only as Johnston’s own fair copy, made “some years after” it was written, as the editor notes; the date and the words of the entry are therefore his later copy of them, and his note on the society was added in that copy. The number of members (“about a dozen”) and of initiates (“60 cadets in one week”) are his. No other record of the cadets’ lodge has been found, and the professor’s regulation is known only from Johnston.

What we searched before calling it new

Chronicling America, every spelling of the order’s name state by state for 1830–1852 (about 1,400 pages read); the Internet Archive’s full text; the Filson Historical Society’s publications; the Kentucky newspapers we could reach; the order’s histories (Then and Now, 1966; Credo quia absurdum, 1949; Wilson, 1995) and its websites; web searches for “Eclampsus” with Kentucky and Georgetown. None names a lodge in Kentucky before Bardstown in 1852.

Our standard for calling a finding new is set out in How we research, and how we weigh each kind of record in Scrollsigns.

“New” means new to print as far as we can tell. If you know of an earlier publication, tell us and we will credit it here and raise the note’s version.

Works cited

Earlier work, catalogues and databases named in this note, besides the records quoted above.

1. E Clampus Vitus, E Clampus Vitus: Then and Now, 1852–1966 (Stockton, 1966). https://ecv13.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Then_and_Now_1966.pdf

The full story

The finding is set out in context, with the rest of its sources, in E Clampus Vitus: the complete record. In the discoveries register:

• georgetown-ky-1847