Watching the river flow

This month in history (164 years ago)

Class canes were carried for the first time by the class of 1869. Twenty years later, when a picket fence surrounding the campus was torn down, seniors made canes from the cedar posts. It was customary for seniors to begin carrying their class canes during the month of May preceding graduation. After 1934 the senior classes sporadically observed the tradition, and it died out by the end of the 1930s. — Courtesy “Photographic Saga of the University of Michigan” by Anne Duderstadt

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