Flat Hat Club

The Flat Hat Club is a collegiate secret society and honor society at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Originally called the F.H.C. Society, it was founded in 1750.

Early in the 21st century, the education section of The New York Times profiled America's oldest university clubs and societies and included a letter, now housed in the archives at Swem Library, which Thomas Jefferson wrote to Thomas McAuley, mentioning Jefferson's membership in the F.H.C.

The society was founded as the F.H.C. Society at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia on November 11, 1750. It was organized for "charity, friendship, and science". F.H.C. met regularly for discussion and fellowship, especially at the Raleigh Tavern.

William & Mary alumnus and third American president Thomas Jefferson may be the most famous member of the F.H.C. Society. Late in life, Jefferson wrote that, "[w]hen I was a student of Wm. & Mary College of this state, there existed a society called the F.H.C. society, confined to the number of six students only, of which I was a member. Still, it had no useful object, nor do I know whether it now exists."

F.H.C. Society is believed to be the precursor of Phi Beta Kappa. A second Latin-letter fraternity, the P.D.A. Society (publicly known as "Please Don't Ask"), was founded at William and Mary in March 1773, in imitation of the F.H.C. Society. John Heath, a student at William and Mary who in 1776 sought but was refused admission to the P.D.A., later established the first Greek-letter fraternity, the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

The student members of the F.H.C. suspended the club's activities in 1781, probably due to the suspension of academic exercises at the college as the contending armies of the American Revolution approached Williamsburg during the Yorktown campaign.

"The memory of this fraternity had entirely died out at William and Mary, but [after 1909, there was a] discovery of certain manuscript material in the correspondence of St. George Tucker, who was a student of the College in 1772. ... These manuscripts consist of (1) a letter of Mr. Jefferson, written to John D. Taylor, of Maryland, giving some account of the club at the College, stating that he was a member ... [;] (2) a list of the books described as compiled for the club's library, in 1772, by Rev. Thomas Gwatkin, Professor of Mathematics; (3) the credentials of Robert Baylor as a member in abbreviated Latin." Thus, the club possessed a small library.

The group's name was revived on September 30, 1920, by twelve undergraduate men and four professors who originally organized as the Spotswood Club, which was formed in 1916. It differed markedly from the original society, a fraternity of six undergraduate men with alumnus members in urbe – that is, "in town", having graduated from the university. This society operated largely as a collegiate honorary society whose members were not secret and were published in the college's yearbook and newspapers. It suspended its activities in 1943 due to World War II.