The Flat Hat Club is the popular name of a collegiate secret society and honor fraternity founded in 1750 at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The fraternity, formally named the "F.H.C. Society", was founded at the College on November 11, 1750. The society maintains relationships with societies at the University of St. Andrews and Amherst College. The F.H.C. Society is the first recorded collegiate secret society in the United States of America. Early in the 20th century, the Education section of The New York Times profiled America's oldest university clubs and societies and included a letter (now in the archives held at Swem Library) which Thomas Jefferson wrote to Thomas McAuley, mentioning Jefferson's own membership of the F.H.C. History of the original society The initials of the F.H.C. Society stand for a secret Latin phrase, likely "Fraternitas, Humanitas, et Cognitio" or "Fraternitas Humanitas Cognitioque" (two renderings of "brotherhood, humanity, and knowledge"). The "brothers" of the original F.H.C. devised and employed a secret handshake, wore a silver membership medal, issued certificates of membership, and met regularly for discussion and fellowship, especially at the Raleigh Tavern. The group became publicly known by the backronym "Flat Hat Club" in probable allusion to the mortarboard caps then commonly worn by all students at the College (now worn at graduation by students at most American universities). William & Mary alumnus and third American president Thomas Jefferson may be the most famous member of the Flat Hat Club. (Other notable members of the original group included Colonel James Innes, St. George Tucker, and George Wythe.) Late in life, Jefferson noted 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, but it had no useful object, nor do I know whether it now exists." 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 activities of the group in 1781, probably as a result of the suspension of academic exercises