Oct. 1, 2024 marked 137 years of Smith’s much loved, highly anticipated Mountain Day. Throughout the weeks prior, Smithies speculated about the day the Wilson Bells would wake them up, signaling their day off. After an unsuccessful Sept. 23 Quad Riot, where students rallied together to urge President Sarah Willie-LeBreton to hold Mountain Day the next morning, the entire campus let out a sigh of relief when the long-awaited bells finally rang.
Every year, Smith College’s Mountain Day comes as a surprise to the student body, a day when the President of the College cancels classes on a beautiful autumn day. Students celebrate by enjoying apple-flavored treats on Chapin Lawn, then partaking in various fall activities, such as apple picking, hiking, baking or simply taking a much-needed day off from classes. Mountain Day remains one of the most cherished traditions on campus, with many alums around the world continuing their own celebrations of the day after their time on campus.
Despite this deep love for a long, famous tradition, various aspects of the day continue to change over the years. Notably, this year and last, the College has stopped providing transportation to local orchards, instead bringing apples to the Houses to continue the day’s connection to the fall fruit.
While these minor changes are often met with feelings of loss for tradition, a look into the Smith College archives shows that despite a lengthy 137-year history, Mountain Day has remained largely unchanged.
The very first Mountain Day, Oct. 6, 1877, saw 19 Smithies climb to the top of Mount Nonotuck to dine and relax while enjoying the Western Massachusetts views from over 800 feet above the Pioneer Valley. From then on, generations of Smithies would make similar journeys off campus, following in the footsteps of their ’77 predecessors.
Photos as early as 1882 show women in floor-length skirts skipping across logs over Whately Glen, some hiking up their skirts to wade in the water — a scandalous sight at the time. Others opted to hop into horse-drawn carriages to ride off to Deerfield, Greenfield, Mt. Sugar Loaf, Chesterfield, Mt. Holyoke, or Mt. Tom, while some groups chose to picnic in the woods with College-made boxed lunches.
As the decades changed, particularly around the turn of the century, so too did the way students celebrated Mountain Day; yet, the day did not lose its roots. Rather than climbing into horse drawn buggies, students piled into trailer beds, making their way to mountains to hike, dine, picnic or simply lounge around.
As transportation improved, Smithies went farther from campus, able to travel all the way to New Haven or Cambridge to spend the day away from a deserted campus.
Even when the dreaded rainy Mountain Day came every once in a while, students made the most of the day, donning rain boots and coats to ascend the many hiking trails that surround the College on foot or by bicycle, often with the help of the Outing Club.
Mountain Day remains one of the most well-loved Smith College traditions to date. Despite remaining a part of the College’s history for nearly two centuries, surprisingly very little has changed about the day. While small changes, from clothing to modes of transportation to house names, occur over the years, the spirit of Mountain Day is alive and well throughout the student body.
