AMERICAN ROWING COMES OF AGE Thomas E. Weil Collection Harvard-Yale Course, 1878 to present Thames River, New London, Connecticut The Yale compound is above the “T” and the Harvard compound is above the “A” in “THAMES.” near the north end of the course, Red Top for Harvard and Gales Ferry for Yale. The other major rowing schools very much wanted to join in, but Cook continued to bar their participation. Crowther: “Harvard and Yale, with rowing records before the others had even purchased a boat, felt that they were the leaders of rowing, while the others considered that speed was the best claim for preëminence and not the accident of being first born. Challenges passed to and from, but they were not taken up, and both Yale and Harvard desired to confine rowing to themselves.”1223 The IRA In 1889 in frustration, Cornell, Columbia and the University of Pennsyl- vania began holding their own race on the Thames right before the Harvard-Yale event. In 1891, the three colleges proposed1224 and then formed1225 the Intercollegiate Rowing Association, and in 1892, they finally left New London in frustration and disgust. Historian Robert F. Kelley: “In the early part of December in 1895, a tug made a journey from Poughkeepsie [New York] upstream [on the Hudson River] for about three miles with three young men aboard her. With the men was a Judge Hasbrouck of Poughkeepsie. The three visitors were Thomas Reath of Pennsylvania, Charles Treman of Cornell, and Frederick Sill of Columbia. “The three were looking for a rowing course, now that Yale and Harvard were drawing so definitely together and taking over the New London course. They had looked at other places: Saratoga, Cayuga and Seneca Lakes upstate, the Connecticut 1224 The Crews on the Thames, An Intercollegiate Rowing Association Proposed, The New York 1223 Crowther, p. 90 Times, June 23, 1891 1225 Collegiate Oarsmen Organize, A New Intercollegiate Rowing Association Formed, The New York Times, November 1, 1891 323
