Illustration by Jonathan Carlson
From the outlandish to the perfectly plausible, the Colgate Scene explored 13 Colgate legends in hopes of either verifying or disproving the titillating tales that have been told over the years. Read the feature at colgate.edu/scene, test your knowledge, and prepare to be surprised.
For example …
Found at the bottom of Taylor Lake: a piano, cars … and a hatchet
PARTIALLY TRUE
You know the joke: What’s the difference between a piano and a fish? You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish. However, there may be both fish and a piano in Taylor Lake, according to a 1997 Maroon-News article on Colgate mythology. The authors, Neal Bailen ’99 and Peter Lindahl ’98, cite a source as saying it’s a “credible rumor” that a piano melted through the ice after a winter party and rests at the bottom of the lake.
Bailen and Lindahl also tell a story from the 1976 Spring Party Weekend when a car was pushed from the top of the hill at James B. Colgate Hall and “plunged into the watery depths.” They add that in 1991, the owner of a white Datsun parked at the library “forgot to set the emergency brake and later returned to find that his car had disappeared.” Both of the cars, they reported, were pulled out the day after the incidents.
Jack Loop, Hamilton’s town historian, threw in his two cents recently: “There could be a piano (although I’m remembering that it was a harpsichord), but I question the cars. The ‘lake’ is only four or five feet deep. It’s named after Professor James Taylor (he also was superintendent of buildings and grounds), who had the swamp dug out and made into a lake. It was dredged in the 1970s and no four-foot-high cars were found.”
While we continue to test the water on these theories, it is a bona fide fact that students literally “buried the hatchet” in Taylor Lake. A 1920 Maroon article explains that, on Moving-Up Night, students would toss a hatchet into the lake as a symbol of the year’s end to the freshman-sophomore class rivalry.