, with its curriculum continually expanding, though wisely and
not too rapidly, and with an ever-increasing emphasis on the highest
ideals of scholarship and service, there is every promise for a future
of greater usefulness and effective service for the University. We, who
love the University of Michigan for what it has accomplished, for what
it is, and for what it may become, may well look for a development
through the coming years that shall be a fitting continuation of the
remarkable success of the great experiment involved in its
establishment.

CHAPTER IX

STUDENT LIFE

Although the life of the student in the earliest days of the University
had a bucolic simplicity almost unimaginable to the undergraduate of
these days, it was not without its sterner side. The Rev. Theodoric R.
Palmer of the class of '47, who entered the University in 1843, thus
emphasizes the contrast between those times and the present:

But twenty-five years had elapsed since the first steamship crossed
the Atlantic and the first ten miles of passenger railway in the
United States had been laid but fifteen years. The telegraph was a
recent invention ... electricity was a plaything, and electrical
engineering unknown.

Nothing will point this contrast better, perhaps, than the mere fact
that the Michigan Central, which had only reached Ann Arbor a year or so
before, was running one train a day between Detroit and _Dexter_. Most
of the students we may assume, therefore, rode into town on horseback,
as he did, with their gear behind them, or perhaps took advantage of the
several stage lines which centered in Ann Arbor.

They found a little town charmingly situated in forests and farm
clearings, lying for the most part in the valley of the Huron, though
gradually reaching out toward the University, from which a few houses
could be seen along the western side of the country road which now is
State Street. The Campus, which for years "looked like a small farm,"
was surrounded by a fence with a turn-stile on the northwest corner.
This was often broken and was finally replaced by a series of steps,
over which the students passed to their boarding houses in town after
their morning recitations and their afternoons of study. In time this
stile gave way to posts with room enough between for a man, "but not for
a cow." Early hours were imperative, for kerosene or "coal-oil" was
practically unknown in the forties, and