(Skull & Bones Society) A superb collection related to the infamous Yale secret society that counts several presidents together with top diplomats and financiers among its alumni. The group features a gold Skull and Bones lapel pin together with a leather-bound photograph album bearing cartes de visite of its members from the class of 1872.

The collection, from Edward T. Owen, a member of the class of 1872 includes his gold lapel pin with the skull emblem on top (the crossed bones over the number “322”, measuring 3/4 in. width with a hinged straight pinback. The reverse is engraved “E. T. Owen”. Owen’s pin is accompanied by a leather-bound photo album containing eighteen cartes de visite one of each of the members of the class of 1872, a group image posed with the skull & bones, the skull & bones alone, as well as an image of the society’s home, “The Tomb.” The collection also includes five additional cartes of Skull & Bones members not part of the Class of 1872.

Edward Thomas Owen entered Yale University with the class of 1871 and joined the class of 1872 at the beginning of his senior year. After graduation Owen studied two years at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Germany and a year in Paris. He returned to the United States as a professor of French and Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin. Owen, with the Mutton Chops facial hair, is pictured wearing this pin. The roster of the Skull and Bones Class of 1872 records only fourteen members; however, there are fifteen cartes de visite in the members section of the album and an equal number in the group image. In addition to Owen the other Bonesmen in 1872 were: Robert Elmer Coe, who died shortly after graduation in 1872 of typhoid fever; William Lee Cushing who taught at Yale and founded the Westminster School in Dobbs Ferry, New York; Charles Clerc Deming, who, after graduating from Columbia Law School, became vice president of the Jacksonville, Tampa, and Key West Railway Company; Henry Champion Deming, secretary and treasurer for the Mercantile Trust Company of New York; Frederic Shepard Dennis, a professor of surgery at Bellevue Medical College; John Howard Hincks, an ordained minister who served as dean of Atlanta University and professor of History and Social Science; Benjamin Hoppin, a German translator; Alexander Ross Merriam, a pastor; George Foot Moore, also a pastor; Henry Silas Payson, who practiced law in St. Louis, before he retired to Payson Farms at Mossville, Illinois; Charles Benjamin Ramsdell, who graduated from Union Theological Seminary and became a pastor; George Atherton Spalding a physician at the House of Refuge, Randall’s Island, New York; and, Theodore Salisbury Woolsey a professor of law at Yale Law School.

Cartes and pin quite clean, expected wear to binding of photographs, overall very fine.

(EXA 3881) SOLD.