Eight students, Margaret Batten, Louise Davis, Martha Trent Featherston, Isabella Merrick, Sallie Michie, Lelia Scott, Elizabeth Watkins, and Lucy Wright founded the sorority in 1898.

[1] At the same time, Lucy Wright's roommate, Julia Tyler, was working to found Kappa Delta sorority.

In its first decade, Tri Sigma recognized the need for both legal recognition as a social body and a written record of organization.

The NPC rotates chairs every two years between its member organizations in the chronological order of each group's joining date.

Each initiated member receives the latest edition of Tri Sigma's story, The Path from Farmville and "Over a Century of Sisterhood", which chronicles the beginnings of each collegiate chapter as well as the evolution of the national organization.

Above the band in the right third are spreading wings joined by a centered circle, and above these is an equilateral triangle on which is engraved a single Sigma.

Adopted in 1903, the badge of the sorority is an equilateral gold triangle bordered with pearls, with a small semi circular indentation on each side.

The organization centers its latter philanthropic efforts around the theme "Sigma Serves Children", specifically through the Robbie Page Memorial (RPM).

On September 15, 1951, Robbie Page, the son of Tri Sigma's National President, died of bulbar polio, a disease which at that time had no cure or vaccine; this death prompted his parents to establish a memorial fund in his honor.

[6] In its early years, the RPM supported various polio research projects, including the Salk vaccine trials.

[7][8][9] Current national efforts are centered in funding fellowships at the Children's Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, and in funding graduate assistantships at the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.