I know it's hard to picture beneath all the snow, but come spring the Res Quad will once again be a great place to read, sunbathe and play Frisbee. In a month or two when all the igloos have finally melted, you can expect to find me stretched out on a blanket in the sun, pretending to study for exams and thinking about the fact that if I had tried to do this a century ago, I would have been underwater.
Let's begin with the etymology of Res Quad. Even though Miller, Houston and Carmichael currently surround the Res Quad, this abbreviation is actually short for Reservoir Quadrangle, not Residential Quadrangle as I initially believed. The surrounding communities in 1862 chose Tufts to house the Mystic Reservoir, a behemoth constructed from three million bricks with a perimeter measuring a third of a mile at the base of the hill, an area larger than the Res Quad today.
As usual, I entered the archives with the notion that Jumbos in the early 1900s were a mild?mannered bunch who would only use the reservoir, or Res, for the simple pleasures in life. I pictured students ice skating in the winter, bringing their dates to see a romantic sunset and perhaps even going for a midnight swim in the warmer weather. And while the records certainly confirm all of these innocent activities, I should have known that the Res would have a juicier history.
One of the stranger traditions surrounding the Res included Jumbo Rush, a contest in which competitors scrambled up the steep and muddy sides of the Res in a race to claim the first three copies of the yearbook, specially signed by the president of the university. In the spring of 1917, the Tufts Weekly reported that the rush "was expected to be featured by battle, murder and sudden death." Although I've learned to take old Weekly articles with a grain of salt, the photo accompanying the article does indeed show a group of about 50 men duking it out on the muddy banks of the Res for those coveted yearbooks signed by University President Hermon Bumpus.
Its history is not without macabre incidents, demonstrating why it is probably a bad idea to trust college students with unrestricted access to a large body of water on campus. A note in 1922 was found on the edge of the Res in which a woman named Laura alleged that she had drowned herself because of a broken heart. Although a thorough search was conducted by local police and university officials the next day, no body was found and the suicide was assumed to be a twisted practical joke.
By 1940 the Res served little practical purpose and was used only as an emergency water supply. Coupled with a few too many deaths by drowning, the Res was finally drained in 1944. Soon after, rumors swirled about the fate of the Res, with serious proposals to convert it into a faculty village, a bowling alley, dry cleaning facilities, a football stadium to be known as "The Tufts Bowl" or a group of dormitories. The latter suggestion unfortunately won out over the more practical proposals and in 1948 the Res was razed and turned into new dorms and a parking lot.
While it's certainly nice that the parking lot was converted back to a quad and we now have luxurious housing such as Houston Hall, I still feel robbed of my chance to go for midnight swims and to tussle in the mud for an autographed yearbook. And though it will always be among my favorite spring semester pastimes to relax on the Res Quad, just remember: If we still had the reservoir, it would have been exactly like tanning poolside.
Well, sort of.
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