1870

A senior named Alan Devereux joins five of his crazier friends in buying a six-oared "gig" from Yale, which they plan to carry down the hill and row on the Delaware and Raritan Canal. Unfortunately, the pail from Yale sinks after "one hundred yards of the most ridiculous exhibition of rowing," according to an onlooker. Despite the inauspicious start, the five men return to campus to find some interest in what they had done. Princeton and Rutgers had met in New Brunswick the previous fall to play the nation's first college football game, and University President James McCosh had expressed enthusiasm for developing athletics as part of the University's curriculum in his 1868 inaugural address, declaring "every college should have a gymnasium for the body as well as for the mind."