their popularity with the more affluent. In this interregnum the boarding-house keepers waxed fat if their boarders did not. True to prediction, board prices immediately rose, and the poorer students were faced with a serious problem. The deplorable practice of “boarding yourself” came into vogue. An undergraduate in 1858 has left a heart-breaking account of what could be done with Indian meal over one’s study fire. For $9 a term, he asserts proudly, you could get along quite well; and with fine Harvard democracy he adds, “nobody thinks the worse of you.”[1]
These conditions sorely troubled the Faculty, which now included men of big hearts as well as big brains. “Good Dr. Peabody,” especially, set himself to solve the problem. It happened that the “Harvard Branch Railway”—whose history is a tale by itself—had just been forced out of business by the new invention of horse-cars, and its terminal station (on the site of Austin Hall) was standing vacant. This Dr. Peabody hired in 1865, and with the generous assistance of Nathaniel Thayer, donor of Thayer Hall, initiated a new venture in the commissariat field. It was christened “Thayer Commons,” but was really an independent voluntary dining association, managed by its own directors, on strictly business lines, at a low cost, without profit, and
- ↑ S. W. Driver, of 1860, in Harv. Magazine, iv, 275.
