Trademark: Theta Xi Logos

First Used: 1864

Registered: 1956

Current Owner: THETA XI FRATERNITY [1]

Trademark Type: collective mark; design mark

Primarily Associated With: indicating membership in a fraternal organization [2]

Brief (and likely incomplete) History: [3]

The Theta Xi Crown Logo is a significant piece of trademark history – it is the oldest still-active collective mark registration in the United States! The Theta Xi fraternity owns another pair of old and still-active collective mark registrations, including the THETA XI Word Logo [4] (first registered November 6, 1956) and the Theta Xi Coat of Arms [5] (November 13, 1956) collective marks.

Theta Xi Fraternity was founded on April 29, 1864, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, by eight former members of Sigma Delta, a local fraternity. As the Civil War raged on, tensions and division began arising within the local Sigma Delta fraternity after a failed petition to affiliate with the national Sigma Phi society. The founding members Fox, Packard, Waite, Brainerd, Buel, Farnum, Raymond, and Starbuck used a symbolic black-and-white bean voting process to dissolve Sigma Delta and began developing a new constitution, ritual, and identity, officially establishing the Alpha Chapter of Theta Xi.

Theta Xi quickly grew beyond RPI, establishing its second chapter at Yale University in 1865, and gradually expanded across the northeastern United States over the next four decades. The Fraternity remained regionally focused until 1905, when it chartered its first chapters in the Midwest and later extended to the West Coast, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest.