The Steward also provided furnishings and bedding for the dormitory rooms until the late ’50’s; the occupants were left to supply wood or coal for their stoves and tallow· candles and sperm oil lamps for illumination. Flowers and plants, occasionally found in the windows, afforded a homelike touch. Bathing facilities consisted bf a bath house to which spring water was piped down the hill. In winter some Spartan youths took morning showers in the ice-cold water, roaring with pain at the shock, and then wrapped in overcoats, they dashed to their warm rooms to recover.
To relieve the tedium of study in the long winter months, there were innocent amusements such as skating on the Chenango Canal, coasting, or bees to fill the Steward’s ice-house, followed by a savory supper. In summer, students took long walks, often stopping to pick strawberries, or went on brief camping trips to nearby ponds. Then, too, there were opportunities throughout the year for the companionship of the young ladies in the Hamilton Female Seminary, or “Ham Fem Sem”
as it was popularly known, which local citizens had established in 1856. Its receptions were social highlights to which the young men eagerly sought invitations and reciprocated by taking the girls to campus events such as the literary societies’ public exhibitions and baseball games. Some village homes, especially Deacon Charles C. Payne’s, welcomed the boys from the Hill. They also found diversion and stimulation at public lectures by such noted men as Emerson, Beecher, Gough, and George William Curtis.
The pronounced religious atmosphere which had pervaded campus life from the 1820’s moderated somewhat after 1850 as a result of the growing number of non-ministerial students and of outside pressures, particularly the issues which led to the Civil War and the effects of that conflict. Most students were church members, however, and participated in prayer meetings and other religious exercises; the Students Association annually elected a theologue to deliver a sermon at one of its assemblies. With the dissolution of the Seminary Church in 1851, all members of the University attended morning services with the village Baptist congregation and shared in their five stirring revivals in the ’50’s and ’60’s. Frequently the faculty supplied the pulpit, but Walker R. Brooks, pastor from 1856 to 1873, made the most profound intellectual and spiritual impression. William Newton Clarke, Class of 1861, who was to become one of the most eminent theologians of the Baptists, once said that sometimes as he sat in the
