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GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01790 8028
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016
https://archive.org/details/oldmiamiyaleofea00upha_0
OLD MIAMI
1485403
Thier Robinson
"TRAVELERS ON THE LEMBIRING. OXFORD STAGE HAD AMPLE TIME TO MEDITATE UPON THEIR SINS." Page 26.
OLD MIAMI
The Yale of the Early West
BY Alfred H. Upham
Illustrated by Alice Rebekah Robinson
THE REPUBLICAN PUBLISHING CO. HAMILTON, OHIO 1000
-
COPYRIGHTED BY ALFRED H. UPHAM OXFORD, OHIO 1909
TO
PRESIDENT GUY POTTER BENTON UNDER WHOSE ABLE ADMINISTRATION THE OLD MIAMI AT LAST YIELDS PLACE CONTENTEDLY TO THE NEW.
PREFACE
One hundred years are perhaps only a good, long summer day, in the eyes of the ancient universities of England, or even of those native products along our eastern coast. For a college west of the Alleghenies to have lived so long, however, means that it rose amid the forests, and bore a part in every movement for the development of the great midland region of America. Such is the experience of the old Miami Uni- versity, at this time celebrating her centennial birthday.
The completion of her centenary has recalled to many minds the deplorable lack of a permanant and connected story of her life experiences, coupled with the fact that archives are vague and the tellers of old tales are fast passing away. Already to many of the younger generation "Historic Miami" is only an empty and hackneyed phrase. The justification of these few chapters lies in the attempt to meet this condition. The result is far from complete or even adequate; but will at least afford a convenient handbook of the favorite traditions and reminiscences.
It is impossible to acknowledge in detail all the author's obligations. Some are to manuscript records, particularly those of faculty and trustees. Others are to publications, old and new, chiefly those of the University itself and of the various Greek fraternities. Most delightful in retrospect are the personal conversations with certain reminiscent individ- uals, among them Doctor MacFarland, Doctor Galbraith, and Doctor Hepburn. To one and all who have aided in this undertaking the writer desires to register a debt of profound gratitude, with the hope that they may find some recompense in having borne a part in preserving to posterity the rich old legends of the Yale of the Early West.
A. H. U.
Oxford, Ohio, June, 1909.
CONTENTS
Page
I.
Pioneer Days .
13
II.
Literary Halls .
53
III. Greek Meets Greek
95
IV. "Female Institutions'
131
V. Historic Pranks
171
VI. "War! ! ! "
207
VII. Reconstruction
253
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Travelers on the lumbering Oxford stage had ample time to meditate upon their sins" . Frontispiece. Page
"The richest treasure under heaven, is a
kind, tender female friend"
60
"Vale mi frater"
93
"Dum vivimus vivamus"
125
"Braving the dread night-air that mothers
talk about"
. 143
"A pitcher of sparkling water on the fine young ladies trailing in below" . . . 181
"One by one the doors and corridors were
closed with great white haycocks" . . 1SS
"Then it was only a pitiable reality"
. 222
"PIONEER DAYS
D URING the summer and fall of 1824, such newspapers as were then printed in the Ohio Valley carried a form- al announcement of the opening of the Miami University. The notice was com- monplace enough. Flanked on one side by the description of somebody's runa- way mulatto slave; on the other by Icha- bod Sweeney's glad acclaim, unchanging as the sun, that his large stock of holiday goods was now open for inspection, these modest lines of wavering type in single column offered little to attract the eye. "Miami University," they read, "will be opened on the 1st day of November next, 1824. Session 1st November to Ist May. Tuition $10.00. Same session Grammar
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School $5.00. Study hour, 5 to 7 a. m., 2 to 5 p. m. Recitation 7-8 and 9-12 a. m. Prayers, 9 a. m. and 8 p. m. Boarding $1.00 to $1.25 per week." Then followed the estimate of expenses per year:
"Board
.$50.00
Tuition
20.00
Washing
8.00
Candles and wood
5.00
Room and servant's hire.
5.00
Extra
5.00
$93.00"
In those pioneer villages and on the farms newspapers came too rarely and cost too much to be trifled with; and the thrifty householder pulled his chair close to the kitchen table, snuffed the tallow- dip, and spelled out every word of every column-advertisements and all. To many such readers this college notice ap- peared as an oasis in an arid, though all too familiar plain. Father clasped toil-
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roughened fingers about his knee and · stared straight before him through a vista of splendid possibilities for the boys- his boys-who should profit by the oppor- tunities of a real University here within easy reach. The boys themselves eagerly scanned each irregular issue of the paper for a fresh look at the familiar bit of ad- vertising, and lingered over every word of its inky lines. In the fields or by the autumn hearth they all united in comput- ing resources and devising economies, to balance these against that forbidding total of $93.00. Opportunity knocked early, you say, at the batten doors of these pioneer cabins. Indeed she did; but to those who followed the Miami Uni- versity from its institution, progress had seemed slow enough.
More than a generation earlier, one John Cleves Symmes had made one of those bold and indefinable purchases of
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government land so popular in the old days. It started from the Ohio River and ran north between the Little and the Great Miami-probably to that mystic polar circle which John's illustrious nephew, John Cleves the second, imag- ined as the portal to his densely popu- lated world within the world. John Cleves the elder was rather partial to the surface of the earth; but obligated himself, at government request, to re- serve one township in his purchase for the maintenance of an "academy." "Academy" and "university" were both beautifully vague words in those days, you know. Then the lands went on, the market. Dense forest undergrowth meant long months of labor in the clear- ing; but it also meant fertile bottomland thereafter; and there was little trouble in disposing of large tracts of such prospect.
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Somehow in the rush of business Symmes forgot about the township he had set apart for an offering to Athena. When she called him to account, there was no disputing the fact that large and irregular portions of her sacred confines had been already legally conveyed to John Doe and Richard Roe and their heirs and assigns forever, and that said John and Richard, with such of said heirs as could manage axes, were busily desecrating the virgin forests of the goddess. Symmes apologized to Governor St. Clair and of- fered to substitute another township, for which there had been no apparent de- mand. The governor refused this, and finally Congress, who had more land than anything else at her disposal, granted a petition to locate the college township west of the Great Miami and entirely out- side the Symmes Purchase. The College, however, was to be within the old bound- aries.
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TTUNEER DAYS
In February, 1809, by act of the Gen- eral Assembly of Ohio, the Miami Uni- versity was formally created, christened, and endowed with a mass of fine phrases and a pathless patch of woodland some- where up along the Indiana line. A group of trustees was appointed, whose obvi- - ous business it was to put this woodland on the market and get it to paying rev- enue. At the same time three commis- sioners were entrusted with the responsi- bility of finding the most desirable spot . between the two Miamis for such a prom- ising institution to occupy.
Both bodies found pretty dense under- brush ahead. The college lands were at first offered at such terms of rental that only the least desirable of settlers ap- proached them. Only two of the locating commission ever got together at all. No- body seemed to know what happened to the third one, but there is a dastardly
PIONEER DAYS
rumor afloat that, despite his cloth, he fortified so strongly with ardent spirits for each session that he never managed to report for roll call. The two survivors were handsomely treated. Public-spirited citizens from various communities solic- ited the favor of their presence, and filled them to the brim with the commercial ad- vantages of Cincinnati and Dayton, the scenic attractiveness of Lebanon, and the salubrious waters of the Yellow Springs. They balked on the last and gave a verdict for Lebanon. Then at the next legislative session, some one-not from Lebanon-contrived a plan to solve all difficulties together. This was to make the college lands attractive by placing the college itself in their midst. Remember- ing the delinquent but fortified com- missioner, the assembly declared the first location illegally selected and established the University within the township at the
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PIONEER DAYS
village of Oxford, which it graciously created for the purpose. Spirituous forti- fication has been unpopular in Lebanon ever since.
There was much toil to intervene be- tween this simple settlement of the case and the newspaper announcements of the opening of an actual university. Grad- ually, however, the stubborn tract of densely wooded territory was portioned out and brought under subjection. Grad- ually the new village began to awake and stretch itself along the hill-top. In 1812 there was a real brick house, the wonder of the community, erected by Joel Collins, the statesman-surveyor who had run the lines of every farm in the township. Per- haps in pride, perhaps with the idea of permanent record, Captain Collins im- bedded in his foundation two iron spikes, distant from each other exactly the length of his surveyor's chain. This has pre-
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PIONEER DAYS
vented endless wrangling since, for the good Captain's measuring unit suffered from a few missing links. Building con- tinued at a fairly rapid rate until it cul- minated in a spacious market-house on the public square, and the cup of munici- pal joy was full.
The trustees were anxious to have the University in operation promptly. To hurry matters on they arranged to send into the east a college "missionary," a Rev. John W. Brown, who should solicit contributions to an endowment fund, and gather up donated books or equipment, or anything in fact that might prove useful to a respectable young university. After two years of polite rebuffal the agent went the way of all good mission- aries; and while John Brown's body lay a-mouldering the trustees pitilessly cast up accounts and found that, deducting ex- penses, there was nothing left but a heap
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PIONEER DAYS
of discarded volumes for which just then they had neither room nor use.
Such funds as accrued from the lands went to the erection of buildings. They began with what the records call a "school-house," when they had only $150.00 to put into it. Then came a struc- ture that cost over $6,000.00, together with a professor's house; and a grammar school was immediately opened. Finally, in 1820, the contract was let for the cen- tral portion of the old Main Building, con- necting with the part already in use, and designed even then "to be the center and principal building of the University." This is the structure referred to in docu- ments of the time as "a superb College edifice;" "a large and elegant college building;" "not inferior to any in the state." For miles around, the good Scotch-Irish pioneer, riding in to do his marketing, might catch glimpses of this
PIONEER DAYS
pile of brick and mortar crowning the highest point in all the countryside, and might rub his aching joints and feel the certainty of compensation for his unend- ing labors.
There was one unpleasant spectre, though, always interfering with those dreams of certain compensation. Other communities, with considerably more in- fluence on the legislature, were habitually finding plausible and suspiciously unself- ish reasons for removing the University from poor lttle Oxford. Plots and coun- terplots were devised at one point or an- other, to be sprung upon a legislature that had no particular interest in the squabble, anyhow. The citizens of Ox- ford spent most of their spare time in mass meetings, working stray bits of elo- quence out of their systems, and kindling fiery denunciations of their designing ad- versaries. One pamphleteer soared even
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PIONEER DAYS
to the heights of prophecy, and gave ut- terance to a bit of Delphic lore well worth preserving. This is the vintage of 1814: "The present arrangement which has been made for the disposition of the lands belonging to the Miami University is such that when the lands are all disposed of it must afford a greater income to the Uni- versity than any other seminary of learn- ing in the United States is endowed with, and I trust the time is fast approaching, and now not far distant, when we shall behold a splendid college, whose stately spires tip the clouds and whose surround- ing country bespeaks the industry and happiness of its inhabitants, where only a few years since the howling of the beasts of prey and the war whoop of the Indian were the only sounds which broke upon the ear of the wandering traveller. On that same spot shall we meet with the youth assembled from the various quar-
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PIONEER DAYS
ters of the world, to learn the arts and become acquainted with rhetoric and belles-lettres. Astonishing change! But it is a change which every circumstance warrants us in expecting!" Do you catch the fine, old independence-day flavor?
When November, 1824, arrived, the infant university appeared to absorb the breath of life with rather slow, uncertain gasps. The new building was ready, and those hospitable rooms at $5.00 a year- including servant hire-were swept and garnished till they shone. Verily the laborer was worthy of his hire. The faculty was assembled as one man-or rather as two men, since it consisted only of the newly-chosen Scotch Presbyterian president, Robert H. Bishop, and a tutor who answered to the name of Sparrow. The students were not so prompt, but it was probably not altogether their fault. Horseback riding along blazed trails and
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PIONEER DAYS
through sloughs of despond called bridle paths may have been exhilarating exer- cise, but it was not speedy. Even when this was piered out with a bit of rapid transit via Canal Boat to Hamilton, to take the lumbering Oxford stage from there, travelers had ample time, and fre- quent occasion, to meditate upon their sins. By December twenty students had arrived. All through the winter they kept coming, as the frozen trails became passable or they saw their way to that $93.00, until the first college year had an enrollment of nearly a hundred, and the Miami University became a reality.
There are many men today who pro- test that the ideal college is of the variety typified by Mark Hopkins at one end of the log. By such standards no wonder that the old Miami ranked so high. Logs there were a-plenty; and to hold down the ends of them there came from year to
PIONEER DAYS
year a group of intellectual heavyweights, the benediction of whose influence is still present in countless households and com- munities.
At the head of the list stands the stal- wart, though somewhat rawboned and un- gainly figure of President Bishop. A Scot of the Scots, he was a graduate of Edin- burgh and a warm adherent to staunch old-school Presbyterianism. Twenty years before, he had felt a call to the Master's service in America; and drifting to Kentucky, had become connected with the early history of old Transylvania University there. He had made many friends, and these were instrumental in bringing him across the river to pioneer duty at Miami. Over his high cheek- bones twinkled a pair of friendly eyes, which spoke to every boy who penetrated the outer circle of administrative chill, and told of sympathy and understanding
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PIONEER DAYS
and a Carlylesque longing to clasp the whole world to his bosom and soothe its grief.
Like Carlyle, too, the good doctor, when aroused, was a "michty fichter," and there were some turbulent times in those seventeen glorious years of pioneer experience. Those country lads had sturdy spirits and fierce passions, as we shall see, and the echoes of Revolutionary days were still dinning in their ears the martial strains of liberty. As they came to know the great throbbing heart of this first president, their own hearts went out to him in filial devotion. But they sorely tried his soul, and the occasional outburst of his awful anger came usually too late to serve the cause of discipline. The very lads whose unchecked pranks spelled dis- aster to his administration were readiest to defend and uphold him in time of need. No one can compute the measure of his
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PIONEER DAYS
t
influence in those long years of service; the constructive policies he instituted, the economies he practiced, the standards he established, the characters he made. Yet his was a Pisgah-sight of the land of promise, and the mantle of authority was stripped from shoulders not yet stooped with age.
Associated with him was a man whose name has long been lisped familiarly in every home and schoolroom in the coun- try :- Professor William H. McGuffey, author of those dear old dog-eared Eclectic Readers that opened to us the gates of literature. He came to Miami a mere lad, lifted from the middle of his senior year at Washington College, Pennsylvania. In his decade at Miami he became a devoted and effective preacher of God's word, laid the foundations of his mature scholarship in philosophy and metaphysics, and drew from his path-breaking experiments in
1
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PIONEER DAYS
child-psychology the system and material for his school-books. He was more severe in discipline than Doctor Bishop and ap- peared much less approachable. Still he had many warm friends among students and villagers, and these seem to have known the real man.
Two passions at this time consumed his young life-the preaching of the Gos- pel and the education of the child-mind; neither of them, by the way, peculiar to cold, unapproachable men. Such was his zeal for the spoken word that he en- couraged students to meet with him every morning before breakfast that he might drill them in public oratory. Stranger still, tradition says that they always came. His own delivery was quiet and almost conversational, but powerful in its effect. Large crowds attended when he preached in chapel, and between times he minis- tered in the log churches of neighboring
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PIONEER DAYS
villages. All the country around knew at sight his, stove-pipe hat and solemn suit of shiny black bombazine, for which broadcloth was substituted on very formal occasions. At one time the Darr- town congregation, for which he was sup- plying, impressed by the glossy sheen of his garments, remonstrated with him for his Godless extravagance, only to be con- vinced that the lustrous raiment cost less than their own Sunday-best and outwore it, two to one.
Naturally enough, other places than Oxford have claimed the honor of pro- ducing the MeGuffey readers. But every student in those old days knew of the ex- periments going on in town: how the young professor had taken into his house a class of village children, and directed personally every step of their training up from a, b, c; how he was keeping notes of all their blunders and tangles, and retail- 1
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PIONEER DAYS
oring lessons to fit their growing minds; how some day he would give the world the fruits of his experience. Some stu- dents were even permitted to help him in the work, to revise the notes or copy manuscript. True the readers were pub- lished after he went to Cincinnati, but books are not made when men set the types or feed the presses.
Another famous teacher of pioneer days was John W. Scott, kind, genial and considerate, long connected with Oxford institutions, and destined to end his use- ful career in the executive mansion. He and Doctor Bishop held many views in common, particularly in matters of dis- cipline; and when his chief left the insti- tution he had established, Doctor Scott ac- companied him to College Hill and joined him in Carey's premature project of a Farmer's College. Subsequently the Scotts returned to Oxford, with Ben
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PIONEER DAYS
:
Harrison in their train, and gathered about them a circle of demure but be- witching maidens whose avowed purpose was to acquire sufficient of the arts and sciences and social graces to fit them for woman's noble sphere. Their immediate purpose, as it often seemed to the worthy doctor, was to ensnare the hearts of vari- ous callow swains who ranged about the University. But that is another chapter.
It is hard to picture those college men of almost a century ago. We read of them as statesmen, soldiers, professional men. Surely they were more interesting as boys in the paths and corridors of Miami. We know they rose for a study period at 5 a. m. and went to prayers twice a day. We know that the passing of the hours was marked by the notes of a bugle, and that Doctor Bishop to the end of his days thought a bell sinful ex- travagance. We know that such as could
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afford the luxury boarded royally at a dollar a week; the others kept bachelor's hall for half the sum. No wonder, at the market prices then prevailing. Beef and pork cost from a cent and a half to two cents a pound, corn-meal and potatoes were often as low as one bit a bushel, and other things were in proportion. That boy was a poor stick who couldn't man- age corn-cakes or even buckwheats on a griddle, and bake potatoes in the ashes of an open fire.
There were plenty of signs of man- hood and consecrated purpose among the boys. Before the college was a month old, they drew up a complete system of self- government to regulate life in the college building, and elected a regent from among their own number. Almost at once came rival literary societies, with charters from the state, halls dedicated to them by the faculty in perpetuum, a
PIONEER DAYS
printing press, and a newspaper for which their independence permitted the faculty to assume the arrears. Many of the stu- dents were preparing for the ministry, and were not long in forming a mission- ary organization, the Society of Religious Inquiry. This, like the literary societies, accumulated a library and had itself pub- licly addressed by imported talent at least once a year. In 1840, at the tender age of seven, it failed honorably in at- tempting to establish a mission school among the Miami Indians. A deep spirit of religion pervaded the College, and young fellows welcomed weighty prob- lems and thought deep thoughts.
You have guessed it. This is not the only side to the picture. Young saints in college are prone to wear their halos a bit askew sometimes. The steam of youth must escape in occasional bubbles. The path of prescribed virtue was exceeding
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narrow, and even the elect might skid upon a curve. Faculty records bear pain- ful evidence to the truth of this philos- ophy; and many an errant lad, there pil- loried to the end of time, repented, lived to ripe and honored usefulness, and went to his reward despite this blot upon his 'scutcheon. The records for June and July, 1825, display a gruesome list of those "found in bed after the rising hour." No such list appears again, per- haps because there were no more delin- quent». This one becomes significant when you remember that the rising hour was somewhere before five; and more so when you study the names presented. There is such a sameness about them; and the chief offender, whose name appears for nearly every date, meets an end that sounds like a Sunday-school tale. He comes before the faculty again and again on graver charges-indolence, intoxica-
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tion, cards, throwing water on ladies en- tering chapel-and is finally dismissed by the faculty. "Haec fabula docet" that little boys should always rise when the bell rings.
Besides the secrets of the record-book, old-fashioned college discipline did not scruple at public statement of a young- ster's weaknesses. Such statements crept into catalogues, state reports, and espe- cially into the latter end of those semi- annual honor-rolls headed by the word DIGNISSIMI in big black type. Once at least the faculty was severely criticised by an examining committee of the legis- lature for such unseemly exposures, but Calvinistic conscience had its way. Col- lege punishments were always announced in chapel and supposed to gain in chasten- ing power thereby. Even the beginner, not yet imbued with the spirit of the in- stitution and needing only a private ses-
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sion on the green carpet, was condemned to be "publickly, solemnly and affection- ately admonished."
At times matters took a more serious turn. More daring students took advan- tage of Doctor Bishop's good heart, and brawls and disturbances became frequent. The "farming-out" system was tried, and various scholarly manses in obscure and harmless parishes became depositories for refractory youths, who cultivated scholarship in a becoming garb of sack- cloth and ashes. The worst influence to combat in Oxford was that of the so-called "groceries;"-in reality low grog-shops, where students' fists came often into play, and dirks and even pistols were familiar arguments. Bad spirits in the groceries, rash spirits in the student body; no won- der there were so many fisticuffs and spe- cial sessions of the faculty.
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