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Although athletics was not a regular part of the curriculum of the Academy
and College of Philadelphia and it would be over a century before Penn
students had any organized, regular sporting events, athletic activities
were not entirely absent from the lives of these early students. Benjamin
Franklin himself was a swimmer, skater and an advocate of exercise and
physical fitness for young men. Thus it is not surprising that at least
one account of an athletic contest between students has survived.
This record of a Penn athletic event was penned by Alexander
Graydon (1752-1818), who first enrolled in the Academy of Philadelphia
as a young boy in 1760. After his father's death the following year, Graydon's
mother moved from Bristol to Philadelphia where she took in boarders to
help make ends meet. Her boarders included not only sophisticated theater
people and British officers, abut also students at the Academy and College,
located nearby at Fourth and Arch Streets. Alexander Graydon, living with
his mother, continued his studies at the Academy and College of Philadelphia
until September of 1766, when at the age of fourteen he withdrew to study
law in the office of his uncle.
In his memoirs, first published in 1811, Alexander Graydon described
this race run by some of the students (more
on Penn from Alexander Graydon is also available):
My mother... had taken a house in Arch Street, facing the Friends'
burying ground. The first lads that were place with her were two brothers,
the sons of Colonel Lewis, of Virginia. The younger, named Samuel, had
the attractions of a pleasing countenance and a great gentleness of
manners… There was not a boy in school in whose welfare and competitions
I took so decided an interest; the ardor of which was in almost perpetual
requisition, from the circumstance of his being a champion in the gymnastic
exercise of running, which was then the rage. The enthusiasm of the
turf had pervaded the Academy, and the most extravagant transports of
that theatre on the triumph of a favorite horse were not more zealous
or impassioned then were acclamations which followed the victor in a
foot-race around the square. Stripped to the shirt, and accoutred for
the heat by a handkerchief bound round the head, another round the middle,
with loosened knee-bands, without shoes, or with moccasins instead of
them, the racers were started; and turning the left around the corner
of Arch Street, they encompassed the square in which the Academy stands,
while the most eager spectators, in imitation of those who scour across
the course at a horse race, scampered over the church burying ground
to Fifth Street, in order to see the state of the runners as they passed,
and to ascertain which was likely to be foremost, on turning Market
Street corner. The four sides of this square cannot be much less than
three-quarters of a mile; wherefore, bottom in the coursers was no less
essential than the swiftness, and in both Lewis bore away the palm from
every one that dare enter against him. After having, in a great number
of matches, completely triumphed over the Academy, other schools were
resorted to for racers; but all in vain-Lewis was the eclipse that distanced
every competitor, the swift-footed Achilles, against the vigorous agility
of whose straight and well-proportioned form the long-legged stride
of the overgrown and the nimble step of the dapper were equally unavailing.
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