There is an ineffable charm about an old town that has outlived its ambition to be a great city, and Crawfordsville is a fine type of such a place. The region was settled in 1823, and the Montgomery County people, both farmers and townfolk, have long been counted among the sturdiest and most intelligent in the State. A cultivated society has always existed at Crawfordsville, and as the seat of Wabash College it acquired in its youth an academic air that it has never shaken off. The town has been called “The Hoosier Athens,” by envious and less favored neighbors. The analogy is not wholly fortunate, as there are neither porticoes nor statues on the college campus, and no Cimon found occupation here, as at the elder Athens, in tree-planting. Nature had anticipated the need of “groves of academe,” and the trees about the college and through the town are truly of the forest primeval, giving the agreeable impression of a _rus in urbe_. Crawfordsville has often sent young men elsewhere to find occupation; but if its commercial attractions have been slight, its educational advantages have been proportionately great, and Wabash is able to point to a long list of successful alumni. The spirit of change has rarely invaded the college, and men are now holding chairs who have grown old in its service. Wabash has been content to do honest college work and has never made false pretensions as to its ability to do more. “Mere literature,” as Bagehot fondly called it, has not been disregarded, and in no college of ampler endowment have the classics been taught more sympathetically or intelligently. It is one of the few colleges remaining at the West which close their doors to women, although importunate hands have long besought the wicket.