The three founders were Claude Brown, Charles Knapp, and Harold Van Vranken.

[3] At the time of the fraternity's founding, Tri-State College had a ban on secret societies; however, several sub-rosa organizations were known to exist on campus.

Faced with the possibility of expelling twelve of the top students at Tri-State, the college moved to end its ban on fraternities.

The fraternity's original intent was to limit membership to Master Masons and to maintain the scholarship standards of Phi Beta Kappa.

[1] In the early 1930s, the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression, resulting in college enrollment and fraternity membership dropping significantly.

Small nationals were merging or dissolving across the country during this difficult time, however, for the Tri-State chapter, the reason may have been that they were unwelcome.

Hence, as Tri-State was not yet accredited, the chapter may have realized or been advised it was ineligible for a charter with Tau Kappa Epsilon.

This may have been the reason it remained local, and then joined the smaller national fraternity of Alpha Lambda Tau, also a junior NIC member.

[2] (To complete the story on the original chapter, Alpha Lambda Tau was a small national fraternity that in 1947 would later itself merge into Tau Kappa Epsilon as a coincidental, second national merger, that time bringing the Tri-State chapter along with it briefly; but within a year the Tri-State group, now called Beta-Epsilon chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon was forced to return its newly won charter because of the accreditation problem.

[4] The merger with Sigma Alpha Chi put the fraternity on more solid footing during the 1950s and into the 1960s.

As Baird's Manual explained, "The purpose of the fraternity is to foster the indoctrination of the college men of America with the traditions of their American heritage" [1] By the early 1970s, this message wasn't as marketable as hoped.

The Alpha chapter at Tri-State joined Acacia, the largest of the Masonic-influenced fraternities.

A third iteration of the fraternity with a co-ed model was attempted by the surviving Sigma chapter, now defunct.