dents accustomed to manual labor, as most of them were, many having come from farms, lack of exercise often led to impaired health. An adequate gymnasium, a required physical education program and a competent teacher should be provided, the editors asserted. The faculty and trustees acknowledged the validity of these points but action had to wait until the 1890’s.
To be sure, there was a dilapidated wooden gymnasium, so called, of an earlier time which, despite occasional repairs, was little more than a barn. President Dodge in 1886 became genuinely interested in seeing it replaced with a suitable structure and the undergraduates, themselves, launched subscription campaigns for a building fund which were to bear fruit in 1894.
Madison students, like those in other colleges, believed that physical exercise should be made a pleasurable experience in the form of athletics. In 1880 they formed the Madison University Athletic Association to promote various campus sports and intercollegiate competition. Interest in athletics, however, was intermittent, a condition which critics felt a new gymnasium would remedy.
The most popular of the sports was baseball which had been played on an organized basis since 1863 though support for it had fluctuated. In the 1870’s the players had difficulty in finding a suitable spot for the diamond. One location, north of the present Huntington Gymnasium, was plowed up in the spring of 1875, despite their objections. In retaliation, students made an evening’s escapade of turning the sod back into the furrows and thus ruining the field for immediate replowing and planting. They also put the plow on the roof of Alumni Hall and the harrow on the roof of East Hall, emptied a manure wagon on village gardens and dismembered its parts which they distributed on the village green and the “Ham Fern Sem” grounds.
A revival of interest in baseball occurred in the spring of 1880, seemingly inspired by Henry C. Wright, a senior who was the pitcher and the first student to be designated “captain” of a team of any kind. The recently formed Athletic Association sent delegates to Syracuse to join those from Union, Hamilton, Cornell, Syracuse and Rochester in establishing the New York Intercollegiate Baseball Association. This group worked out an elaborate schedule of thirty games to be played in less than a month which was not a success since many games were canceled. All the members of the Association were criticized for hiring