In the fall of 1898, a group of five students of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, desirous of good fellowship and the opportunity to discuss intelligently the problems of a textile career, began to hold informal meetings in one of their rooms or more often at the Old Rathskeller on Broad Street in Philadelphia. Within a year the group had grown to eight and then sixteen members. They were refused membership in a large national fraternity and decided to start their own fraternity. In 1899 they organized their informal club and called it the Delta Kappa Phi Fraternity.

They were an earnest and ambitious group, but things did not go easy in the beginning. In those days most students were at school for only one year and then set off into the world to begin their careers. This presented many difficult problems in maintaining a reasonable membership and a continuity of purpose. Another chapter was formed at the Lowell Technological Institute in 1902, and in 1905 Delta Kappa Phi was officially incorporated as a national fraternity. The eight charter members of the Fraternity were John P. Jones, Charles E. Washburn, Harris A. Soloman, Leon H. Buck, Raymond J. Doyle, Yasujiro Yamaji, William J. Montgomery, and George A. Kerr.

In the ensuing years other chapters were added, and in time the chapter roll grew to 6 chapters, however not all enjoyed the same level of success and by 1979 only Beta Chapter and Kappa Chapter remained. At this point the membership decided that it would focus its efforts on cultivating the existing chapters rather than seek the addition of new chapters. This changed at the end of 1998 when the Delta Chapter at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth was reinstalled after a twenty year period of inactivity.