David asked that I re-post an article from my comment yesterday as a new thread, as some aren’t brave enough to read the comments (and I know even fewer follow links). This is a lovely little bit of Williams history, pulled from an 1895 article found online in the now free New York Times Archives.  Honestly, the reaches of Google never cease to amaze me.

I’ve typed the text of the piece below, but I also recommend that you view the pdf in all of its glory - historic typface and all.

STUDENT WAYS AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Undergraduate Life There Many Years Ago.
John Howard Corwin in the American University Magazine.

In its early days Williams College approached more nearly to Garfield’s famous definition of an ideal institution of learning — “a log with a student on one end and Dr. Hopkins on the other” — than could possibly be imagined by a visitor to Williamstown in these later times. There was then, in fact, little else to make the college beside the Faculty and very few students. The doctor resigned more than twenty years ago, yet his influence is still strongly felt. My impression of the men I saw and learned to love at Williamstown twenty years ago, in my own and contemporary classes, is that there were very few of them sent through college. No body of associates could, on the whole, have been more serious and earnest than they in the pursuit of all that goes to build up manhood.

When the college was in the “log” era it had some peculiar institutions, which have ceased with their causes. One was “Chip Day,” in the Spring when the Faculty allowed a day’s respite from books that the boys might rake up and burn the Winter’s accumulation of chips, which their own sturdy arms had made cutting the wood that burned in students’ stoves.

Athletics were not neglected in the days before steam heaters. “Gravel Day” was anciently another local institution — a recess that the boys might gravel the walks about the campus, those who did not work commuting by the payment of a fine, used to pay for the carts and horses.

Those were the days when, perhaps in a “Chip Day” poem, a Williams man flapped around Parnassus thus:

The roads were not passable,
Not even jackassable;
And he who would travel ‘em,
Must turn out and gravel ‘em.

These useful and healthful days of frolic were merged into “Mountain Day,” now called “Scenery Day,” an opportunity for the athletic pleasure of climbing Greylock and offering sacrifices to the nymphs of the Hoosac and the hills. In these degenerate days, students actually drive to the top of Greylock. Ichabod! Nothing remains to ruin it but a hotel at the summit. It used to offer a grand climb through an almost pathless forest. It needed sturdy legs and good lungs to reach the summit. Sweet was the sleep on pine boughs on that breezy top in a shelter of green branches.

“Mountain Day” is still a Williams Institution. I have heard Martin I. Townsend say that Williamstown had an air to make a man feel like eating a whole ox, and the sturdy old gentleman looked when he said it as if could do it.

Old fellows who chopped their own wood, graveled their own roads, cleaned up the campus and climbed mountains insist that the ancient athletics were far superior to the new in physical, mental, and moral results; that they distracted the students less from the serious work for which men are supposed to go to college; that they were far cheaper than “Weston Field” and the Laselle gymnasium. They insist it is better to swing the axe than throw the hammer; better to climb a mountain and get somewhere than trot on a cinder track that returns to the starting point. Yet it may be these old fellows played “three old cat” and cricket and a mild football in which they kicked the ball and not each other.

Published December 25, 1895
Copyright The New York Times

There is further discussion in the comments section of David’s original post for anyone who wants to know more.

And another bit of Williams history, this time an article from 1854 that recounts a whole host of strange and interesting Williams traditions with their appropriate timing (among them Gravel Day in the Fall, Chip Day in the Spring, and Mountain Day in the Summer). This is amazing stuff. I don’t have the time to type the text of this one into the post, but please check it out! The brief overview: there were events that sound like the precursors to Ivy Exercises - class marshall organized fun events ending at East College; the possible originator of Light Night - evening presentations after the baccalaureate address called “Moonlight Exhibition.” I will admit it gave me chills to see who the speaker was that year - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I could spend far too much time mucking around in the online archive of the NYT. I will follow up perhaps next week with a post about the mysterious mention at the beginning of the 1854 article of a recent “periodical story so discreditable to Williams.” That the internal workings of Williams were worthy of the Times is pretty cool.