Higher Art Once Decorated Student's Rooms in Stoughton Hall-Chambers Have Led Varied Lives in Long History

One of the suites of rooms in Stoughton Hall has had a varied and colorful history, for it has undergone innumerable remodeling, has passed unscathed through a fire which burned rooms on the dormitory floors above and below, and has had its walls decorated with a procession of faculty members with animal bodies pursuing recalcitrant students. No one knows the full story of this unusual suite of rooms, but enough of the details have been unearthed to indicate the vigorous undergraduate life which took place in the old hall a hundred years ago.

As the rooms stand now, traces renfain of much that transpired within them. On the inside of a closet door there is a painting, reported as the work of F. D. Merritt, who lived in the rooms at one time, and later was commissioned by the University to make the portrait of Sopbocles, the eminent Greek professor, which now hangs in the faculty room in University Hall. Men who lived in the rooms 50 years ago have told of a painting in the same room, reputed to have extended all around the walls near the floor, in which the faculty members of that time were represented with various canine bodies, and in active pursuit of the fleeing students. It is said that the authorities fined the men defacing the walls, and then raised the rent for the following year because the room was decorated.