in the early days. Nathaniel West, '46, once told the Washington
alumni, that "among our athletics were various forms of activity--the
foot race from a quarter to a half mile,--baseball, a few rods from the
stile,"--and what will seem certainly a novel event to a modern
athlete,--"sawing our own wood and carrying it upstairs." Edmund
Andrews, the President of '49, has also left a record of his time.

Athletics were not regularly organized, nor had we any gymnasium.
We played base-ball, wicket ball, two-old-cat, etc., but there was
no foot-ball nor any trained "teams." There was mere ex tempore
volunteering. We had jumping wickets in the same way. Fencing and
boxing were totally neglected. The Huron River furnished little
opportunity for boating.

This we may take as a fair picture of athletic activities for many
years. Cricket was undoubtedly the first sport to be organized in the
University, as the _Palladium_ for 1860-61 gives the names of the eight
officers and twenty-five members of the "Pioneer Cricket Club," while
the Regents' Report for June, 1865, shows an appropriation of $50 for a
cricket ground on the Campus,--the first official recognition of
athletics in the University. The game of wicket, which was a
modification of cricket, was played with a soft ball five to seven
inches in diameter, and with two wickets (mere laths or light boards)
laid upon posts about four inches high and some forty feet apart. The
"outs" tried to bowl these down, and the "ins" to defend them with
curved broad-ended bats. It was necessary to run between the wickets at
each strike.

The need for a gymnasium was speedily recognized, but the agitation for
it among the students continued for thirty years before the present
building was finally completed in 1894. The first gymnasium was an old
military barracks which was transformed into a gymnasium of a sort about
the year 1858. It stood near the site of the old heating plant at the
side of the present Engineering Building, and as it was very open to the
weather, resting only on poles sunken in the ground and with a tan bark
floor, it was used only in warm weather. The apparatus consisted of a
few bare poles, ropes, and rings. Even this make-shift was short-lived,
for in 1868 the class of '70 erected a "gymnasium in embryo" described
by a graduate of '75 as "two uprights with a cross-beam and ropes
dangling from eye-bolts--the remains of some prehistoric e