Allan Marquand, in “The Princeton Book,”[243] recites that “in the year 1856-1857 Robert Tarleton and Hugh L. Cole, of the class of 1859, resolved that Princeton should have a gymnasium. When a sufficient sum of money had been raised, a single-boarded structure was erected, and painted with the inevitable _red_, that it might resist the storms of heaven as its founders had resisted the objections of an unpropitious Faculty. All winter long, in this stoveless shanty, with the winds sweeping through from one end to the other, might have been seen a few enthusiastic gymnasts, at work on parallel bars, springboard, trapeze, and ladder, or swinging upon the rings and shaking the rafters in their efforts to touch the beam.... In the year 1864 the building was sadly in need of repair. Through an effort made by the class of 1866 sufficient money was raised to supply it with a stove and a new set of apparatus. Thus renovated, it answered the purpose of a gymnasium, until one night, during the summer vacation of 1865, a report was circulated that a tramp sick with the yellow fever was sleeping there. The next day the building was reduced to ashes by the frightened people of the town.” The Board of Trustees of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at a meeting held July 2, 1857, adopted the following resolution, presented by William M. Corry, one of their number: “Resolved, that the Committee on Finance be instructed to report an appropriation of two hundred dollars for the construction of a plain and substantial gymnastic apparatus for the use of the students of the University.” J. C. Christin, M.D., a Cincinnati German who was Professor of the German and French Languages and Literatures at Miami University from 1856 to 1860, was made manager of the project, and thus outlined its history in a report to the Board of Trustees under date of July 4, 1859: “When in the fall of 1857 the gymnastic apparatus purchased by your committee was offered to the use of the students, a number of them organized themselves at once into a society called the Miami Gymnastic Association, engaged Mr. F. H. Roemler (a German) of Cincinnati as teacher at a salary of $40 a month, and rented a building (a little west of the campus) for their gymnasium at a cost of $60 a year.[244] During that entire first year the classes practised regularly three times a week, and with what success you have seen at our festival, where the young gymnasts of M. U. carried off the first honors of the day over their competitors, delegates from several of the old Turners’ societies. But to bring about this happy result we were obliged to complete our gymnasium by purchasing about $300 worth more of apparatus. This the Association did, encouraged as they were by a generous donation of $150 from the citizens of Oxford and other friends, and believing that they could pay their debt soon by the aid of friends and the proceeds of some exhibitions. At the beginning of the