NMH Magazine : Winter 2003

History Lesson

'Twas jingle all the way for these Northfield students in the late 1940s. They were partaking in the pleasures of a Founder's Day sleigh ride, a long-held campus tradition. A 1922 account of the sleigh rides describes them thus: Under the expert management of the Seminary farm department, the entire enrollment of the Seminary–faculty and students, aggregating about 600–were transported to Mount Hermon in a single continuous line of two-horse bob-sleighs. Although sleigh rides are no longer part of the Founder's Day tradition, the NMH farm still boasts draft horses and a wooden sleigh–which, on its occasional forays into the snowy hills, summons memories of sleighs gone by.