Lehigh Football Nation

The same year Lehigh and Lafayette started their football Rivalry, the cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty was laid down on Beldoe's Island on August 5th, 1884. In attendance at that event was the president at that time, Republican Chester A. Arthur , and Democrat Grover Cleveland , who would win the presidential election later in the year. In 1884, Mark Twain lived in a house just outside Hartford, Connecticut, a Victorian Gothic mansion where he and his family settled after he had penned The Innocents Abroad .  That year, in the upstairs billiards room, he wrote Huckleberry Finn . More local to the Rivalry, in that same year the city of Easton would get electric power for the first time in its history.  “Electric lights now burn brightly in Easton’s streets,” the Lafayette student newspaper noted, “and in many of her business houses and places of amusement.”  (South Bethlehem wouldn’t get electric streetlights until 1887.) It also would be year of the first-ever meet