Tercentenary Column

Sentimental graduates, remembering with a time hallowed fondness chill mornings, icy water, and a sticky-cold pump handle or an occasional hilarious nocturnal dousing, advocate the "restored pump" as a Tercentenary memorial to a Colonial Yard cluttered up with pumps, no less, "stacks of firewood, beer barrels, and outhouses."

In 1811 President Kirkland in the first artistic landscaping undertaken in the Yard eliminated the beer barrels and the untidy wood yard, but the pump remained as a gathering place for students and an object of hilarious pranks, until 1901, when it was destroyed, an easy target for a "Med Fac" exploit.

Destructive Propensity

A common propensity of early students seems to have found expression in the form of destruction to property. The breaking of windows headed the list, while damage to pumps was indulged in long before "Med Fac" days. In 1660 numerous exploits resulted in the following statement of the Overseers: ". . . where any damage is done to ye Edifice of the Colledge (excepting by the inevitable providence of God) to any vacant Chamber of Study, the Colledge fences about the Yard, pump, or clocks, etc: the same shall be made good again by all Students resident in the Colledge at the Time when such dammages shall be done or discovered to be done & shall be duly paid in their Quarter Bills to the Steward of the Colledge. . . ." It was found necessary to re-enact this law in 1734 and 1767.

Historic Pumps

Though there were pumps in the earliest days their positions are now unknown. A map of the college drawn in 1811 locates three pumps parallel to the stream which ran through the low part of the Yard and across the Square.

In 1764 the completion of the old Hollis Hall, the only building north of Harvard Hall other than Holden Chapel, made necessary a pump in this vicinity. This was the famous Yard Pump which remained in service until 1901, long after city water was introduced in the College buildings. After several times being damaged and repaired it was demolished by a "Med Fac" bomb, which nearly carried with it the front of Hollis Hall.

In 1725 the Corporation voted "that a New Pump be procured for Use in the Kitchin & that a New Well be dug and a pump be put in it at the South East Corner of the Yard to accomodate the Students in Massachusetts College." The pump at the east end of Harvard Hall was done away with in 1885 as a test revealed the water was contaminated. The fate of the southernmost pump is unknown.

Personalities

These pumps being the only source of water for both drinking and bathing, "it is easy to imagine the days when the only means of bathing in the Yard was to bend one's back under the spout of the pump, while a roommate vigorously plied the handle." In his "Harvard Memoirs" President Eliot wrote: "The students in my time--nineteen-twentieths of them--brought their water in their own pails from one of two pumps in the Yard, carrying it up to their rooms themselves. They had no hot water whatever, unless they heated a pot on their own fire, and very few did that. Consequently the amount of bathing done in the College was extremely limited. Harvard was a college of personalities.