University of Virginia Library

XXI. The Dormitories and their Regulations

Having obtained their tickets of admission to the
courses of study which they had decided to pursue, the
matriculates were next required to choose their rooms
and hotels. If the student had brought with him the
written authority of his parent or guardian to reside outside
the bounds, he was permitted to do so; and he could
claim this privilege, without such authority, if he had
passed his twentieth year. In both instances, the outboarding
house, as it was called, selected by him, must be
able to show a notice of the Faculty's approval. During
the session of 1832–3, as many as thirty of the young
men,—a very large proportion of the entire number then
in attendance,—found lodgings and meals in the immediate
neighborhood of the University; but this secession
was probably due to the indifferent fare at the hotels
within the precincts, which, at this time, was causing so
much dissatisfaction. In many cases, a single student
would be domiciled for the session with a friend of his
family who resided in the town; but the majority of these
out-boarders were inmates of houses belonging to refined
ladies, like Mrs. Brockenbrough and Miss Lucy Terrell,
who, by the comforts of their hearths, and the excellence
of their food, were able, with more or less success, to
compete with the University hotel-keepers.

The far greater number of the students, however, preferred
to occupy rooms within the precincts, and to eat
their meals at the hotel tables,—a disposition that, naturally,
was encouraged by the Faculty, as the prosperity
of the institution was largely dependent upon the payment
of the rents, and the very existence of the hotels
upon the payment of the monthly board bills. In 1829,
in order to make the dormitories more homelike, a doorway

was cut through the wall separating each two of
them. By this device, one of the rooms could be used as
a chamber, and the other as a study, by two young men.
The executive committee, at this time, was also instructed
to hang a Venetian blind on the alternate door so soon
as the funds in hand should be sufficient. The object of
this ornamental addition was to assure a greater draught
of air in the warm season without diminishing the
privacy.

When the University was completed, it contained, besides
the pavilions, one hundred and nine dormitories,
with accommodations for double that number of students.
Some of them must have remained unoccupied throughout
the first session, since the attendance of young men,
during this session, was a limited one. Five years afterwards,
many vacancies still existed, although thirteen of
the rooms had, by that time, been assigned to the use of
different professors. In 1835, ten were in the possession
of the hotel-keepers and members of the Faculty.
Of the remainder, twenty were inhabited by one student,
respectively, and seventy-nine by two. This disproportion,
no doubt, had its explanation in motives of economy,
for when two students were tenants of the same apartment,
there was an equal division, not only of the rent,
but also of the cost of fagots and candles. As early as
October, 1826, the name of the occupant of a dormitory
was ordered to be "painted above its door." This apparently
was done on a small adjustable panel furnished
by the regular carpenter of the University,—who, in
1832, was Mr. Vowles,—at the trivial cost of fifty cents
apiece. Although the signs were so inexpensive, the
young men usually failed to put them up, until formally
warned that the consequence of omission was a fine; and
towards the end of the session, they seemed to derive a

joyous satisfaction from throwing them into the nearest
ashheap.

Whatever right the student may have possessed at
first to follow his own whim in choosing his dormitory,
it was seriously curtailed, if not taken away altogether,
by a later enactment, which impowered the proctor to
assign the rooms to the students in such manner as to
ensure an equality of boarders at the different hotels on
the Ranges;[23] and under the operation of the same regu
lation, no student was permitted to change his room without
first obtaining the chairman's approval. For each
hotel-keeper, a definite number of dormitories were reserved,
the inmates of which were required to take their
meals in his hotel. This was the first rule that made that
functionary of almost as much importance in the young
men's lives as the professors under whom they sat. The
second was that the hotel-keeper was to supply each one
with the furniture and linen which he would need in his
dormitory; with servant's attendance; and with laundry.
In the beginning, the student was expected to furnish his
own bedding, fagots, lights, and washing, and it was anticipated
that he would be able to do this with ease
through the hotel-keeper; but in the course of the second
year, the duty of obtaining these articles was imposed
directly on the hotel-keeper in the first instance, with the
provision that his outlay on that account was to be covered

by a general charge.[24] The proportionate cost of
the several items is stated in a report drawn up by the
proctor in 1838,—the total expense, during that session,
was one hundred and twenty-five dollars, distributed as
follows: one hundred for table board, ten for laundry,
ten for service, and five for the use of bedding and furniture.
That officer, at this time, supplied the fuel and
candles. On the other hand, it was the hotel-keeper's
function to procure clean sheets, pillow-cases, and towels
once a fortnight; once a fortnight also, he was required
to have the dormitories thoroughly scoured; and once a
week, to make an inspection of each room, either in person,
or through a reliable agent, and to receive the complaints
of the young men, should their comforts have
been neglected by the servant.

This servant was a negro slave who had been hired by
the hotel-keeper, with a view to his performing all the
menial offices of that set of dormitories. The list of his
duties, in 1835, throws light on a characteristic side of
the students' life at that time. At six o'clock in the
morning, he entered the room with a pitcher of water,—
which, in winter, was quite often little below the temperature
of freezing,—and started the fires and cleaned the
shoes. So soon as the student left the apartment for
his hotel to get his breakfast, which was eaten by candlelight,
the servant swept the floor, made up the beds, and
carried away the ashes. Once a week, he blackened the
andirons and polished the fenders; once a fortnight, he

wiped off the "paint work" of the room; twice during
the summer, he whitewashed the fireplace; and daily, at
that season, brought the ice, and in winter, the wood.
At 2:45 o'clock in the afternoon, he took his stand at
some point convenient to his line of dormitories in order
to receive specific instructions from such of the occupants
as should wish him to run on errands to Charlottesville;
but he was not permitted to loiter about the spot after
three o'clock.

The state of neglect into which the students' domiciliary
conveniences and comforts sometimes fell was full
of danger from the modern hygienic point of view. It
taxed the chairman's vigilance to the utmost to compel
the lessees of the hotels to keep their respective rooms
in a wholesome condition of order and cleanliness; and
the smallest slackening on his part too often resulted in
a return to the slovenliness and untidiness against which
the young men so frequently rebelled. The hotel-keepers
relied upon the shifty negro servants; and the servants
themselves, even when willing, were sometimes unable to
maintain the apartments as they should be because they
were not provided with the necessary linen. In December,
1830, there was an outcry from the dormitories, and
an investigation was begun. It leaked out that many of
the students had not been furnished with fresh sheets and
pillow-cases for three weeks, while the floors had not
been scoured since the first day of the session. One of the
hotel-keepers said, in his own defense, that the negro in
charge of his rooms had been too sick to attend to them
with regularity; another admitted that he never visited
those assigned to his boarders; and a third asserted that,
as she was a woman, it was not proper for her to inspect
hers in person. Some of the students were accused of
bad habits, such as spattering the walls with tobacco

juice, and even with dragging the sheets and blankets
from the beds and sleeping on the floors in front of the
fire.[25]

In the beginning, the young men, as we have mentioned,
were expected to purchase their own fuel, but as many
neglected to do so before cold weather set in, that duty
was afterwards assigned to the hotel-keepers; and as this
led to bickering, then to the proctor. During these early
sessions, when the vacation occurred in the winter months,
it was calculated that each fireplace would consume from
four and one-third cords to five and a half. The proctor,
in making up his fuel-book for the season, was authorized
to recoup himself for certain incidental costs, and also for
the time and trouble in contracting. The conviction
arose among the young men, three years afterwards, that
they could fill their boxes themselves at a lower rate than
he was willing to grant; and it shows how closely they
figured their expenses, that the entire amount which each
expected to save by buying without the intervention of this
middle-man, was only six dollars. They claimed that
they could purchase a cord of wood at the rate of two
dollars and a half,—as it was, they were compelled to
pay the proctor at the rate of four dollars. He asserted,
in his own defense, that he was able to obtain a supply
for each student more cheaply than the student himself
could do, because he secured it in large quantities and at
the cheapest season of the year. The sawyer too asked
less for cutting up a very large pile than for cutting up
the single load which each inmate of a dormitory would
buy. The proctor was successful in holding on to the
right to furnish the fuel; and in his accounts with the

students, he continued to charge for the sawing of the
wood; for the shrinkage in its weight from drying; and
for his commission as before. He seems to have been
put to little inconvenience by this duty, as it was performed
through an agent. In 1832, this agent, under
his agreement with his principal, furnished a sound horse
and cart for hauling wood to the dormitories. He was
the overseer of the woodyard, managed the hired laborers
employed for the sawing, and kept accurate memoranda
of the loads that went out. His remuneration was
fixed at five per cent. of the amount in payment. The
wood was purchased from the owners of forests situated
in the vicinity of the University, and it was delivered at
the yard by their own teams.

At times, the students suffered keenly from nipping
weather. In February, 1836, the thermometer sank to
zero, and as the yard was then empty, owing to mismanagement,
many of them were permitted to leave their
dormitories and temporarily engage rooms in the taverns
in town. Although fagots could be bought even at this
season at three dollars a cord, the unreliability of the
yard-master raised the question with the Faculty of experimenting
with grates and coal in order to find out
whether coal or wood was the cheaper fuel. All the
coal then used in Eastern and Piedmont Virginia was
procured from the Midlothian mines near Richmond.
If a supply was to be obtained from these mines for the
University, it would be necessary to transport it by barge
up the James and Rivanna rivers to Milton, and thence
overland by wagon.

During several sessions, the hotel-keepers were required
to furnish the candles used in the dormitories,
but in 1832, this duty had been taken over by the proctor.
In the course of that year, Davenport, Allen and

Company, of Richmond, supplied as many as fifteen boxes
in one shipment, the contents consisting of spermaceti
candles, the finest in quality manufactured at that time,
and always sold by the pound weight. Oil lamps also
were now used by the students. We find J. Hanson
Thomas, of Maryland, paying Raphael, of Charlottesville,
one dollar and a half for a gallon of oil. But for
some years yet candles continued to be the most popular
means of illumination; in 1833, twenty boxes arrived by
wagon from Richmond; and the like heavy loads were
constantly repeated until 1838, when lamps seem to
have come into more general use in the dormitories.
Some of these cost as much as five dollars, but such were
perhaps of metal, for, in 1840, a glass lamp could be
purchased for fifty cents. Oil, however, had advanced
to one dollar and seventy-five cents a gallon. Spermaceti
candles were still in use, for, in the course of the
same year, thirty-two boxes were unloaded at the Milton
wharf from a barge that had brought them up from
Richmond.

The students needed the flame of both lamp and candle,
not only after night had fallen, but also at break of
day, for the morning bell was heard before the invisible
sun had risen near enough to the horizon to scatter the
darkness entirely. In 1827, the ordinances required that
this bell should be rung at half past six, and in 1828, at
dawn, throughout the session. The young men were enjoined
to leave their beds at this signal and dress themselves
at once. By sunrise, the rooms were to be in
order for the day, and the occupants, to use the words
of the law, "prepared for business."

The most famous of the early janitors, Doctor Smith,
whom we have described elsewhere, seems, in spite of his
personal popularity, to have been looked upon along the

Lawn and the Ranges as an intermeddler, whenever—
the sound of the bell having died away,—he walked
down the arcades to find out whether the rule to ensure
early rising had been complied with. He did not perform
this duty daily, but somewhat irregularly intentionally
in order to take the sleepers unawares, and to confuse
any plot that might have been woven to trip him in
following his round. If he had been without a sense of
humor, his position would have been intolerable, for
every device that the most ingenious boyish deviltry could
suggest was used without scruple to anger, discourage,
and thwart him. Like an army in bivouac, apprehensive
of attack, the students set sentinels behind the pillars, and
so soon as the janitor was seen approaching through the
half darkness, word was quickly passed along, from door
to door, in warning to the startled sleepers to rise at
once, and jump into their clothes with all the celerity
of men frightened by a cry of fire. Sometimes, the janitor
would enter a dormitory too quickly for the toilet
of the occupant to be completed. A jacket and trousers
would, by one roommate, be thrown on in haste, without
regard to the absence of undergarments, while his companion
would bolt under the bed or into a closet. Doctor
Smith would gravely take his seat before the fire beside
the one who pretended to be dressed, and remain
until exhaustion forced the delinquent to acknowledge
that he was caught. In the meanwhile, his half naked
roommate had been shivering in the cold and in darkness.
But sometimes the table was turned on the Doctor by
placing a basin of water above the door, which discharged
its full contents on his head and shoulders as soon as he
seized the knob and entered the room.

But neither he, nor the servants, nor the proctor,—
who was also required to visit the dormitories at sunrise,

once a week,—could force the students as a body to run
so sharply in the teeth of a natural instinct as to comply
with the ordinance with persistent fidelity. The observance
of this senseless regulation was, in the beginning,
however, more constant and general than would have
been predicted. The violations, during the early sessions,
were, in fact, decidedly moderate in number. In
November, 1830, ten young men were reported for rising
late. Some of these had been guilty as often as five
times, and at least one, habitually. In December of the
same year, there were six delinquents. One of them offered
a rather singular excuse, which, however, was put
forward, not in irony, but in good faith: Archibald Henderson,
of North Carolina, asked to be exempted because
early rising, he said, was invariably followed with him by
a pain in the chest; and he had also noticed the same effect
on himself while a pupil at Yale. In May, 1831,
eleven students were summoned before the chairman for
the offense, one of whom had been guilty on seven occasions.
In April, there were seventeen culprits. At this
time, the earliest class assembled at half past five in the
morning, and some of the young men were required to
attend as often as five times a week at this ghostly hour,
for even in summer the sun had hardly yet risen above
the horizon.

Did the Faculty ever show any disposition to recommend
the abolition of the ordinance? "With all its
imperfect execution," remarked the chairman in 1833,
"and with the utter impracticability of a rigid enforcement
but by means and with consequences disproportionate
to its benefits, I am still of the opinion that the
law is a salutary one. It makes almost all, even the
most indolent, rise earlier than they otherwise would do,

and the consciousness of having offended in this particular
is a check sometimes on other violations." This last
observation indicates the chairman's delicate insight into
the contradictions of human nature; but it is questionable
whether it was strictly accurate as applied to these young
men, who quite probably agreed with the modern view of
the regulation; namely, that the Board and Faculty were
as open to criticism for adopting it, in the beginning, as
the students were for breaking it while it lasted. "Before
sunrise, this morning," the chairman records in
December, 1835, "I was sent for by Mrs. Gray because
one of her boarders had struck one of her servants whilst
at breakfast." Was it very heinous that young men,
kept up late at night by their studies, should have been
inclined to be sulky and irascible when they found themselves,
after dragging themselves out of bed by five
o'clock, eating the first meal of the day by murky candlelight,
and quite probably too in a chilly apartment?

The passage of time only served to make the regulation
more grinding and intolerable. In 1836, ninety-six
of the student body of two hundred and forty-two were
reported in the month of October for leaving their beds
late; in November, thirty-six; in December, seventy; in
the following January, one hundred and nineteen; and in
March, eighty-three. There were, in 1837, three hundred
and fourteen cases in the course of the entire session.
At this time, only two hundred and sixty-three students
were in attendance.

But the effect of the law was not alone to encourage
among the young men a spirit of indifference to all laws
by forcing an unwise one on them,—it unquestionably
tended to lower their health by compelling them to leave
their dormitories before dawn, and to eat their meals, and

to be present at lectures, by candlelight. The rebellions
and epidemics of these early years can, in some measure,
be hunted down to this ill-advised ordinance.