This is an article I am proposing for our local newspaper:

In association with the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science, about fifty engineers gathered in Lakeside, Connecticut for a reunion of Camp Columbia alumni.  Dean Zvi Galil and others reminisced about the 120-year history of the camp grounds. 

During the summers, engineering students learned surveying and other practical techniques that could not be taught at the city’s Morningside Heights campus.  Bonds of friendship developed among the students who attended the program before it ended almost 40 years ago. They reunited four years ago, and again this past Saturday.

Under a party tent, they shared stories of their experiences as urban college students in Litchfield County.  Among the amusing anecdotes were stories of attempts to get a cow to walk up the stairs of the stone water tower, and placing peanut butter and feathers on an engineering student camper at Bantam Lake.

The stone water tower shown was built by students gathering rocks from a nearby stone wall. Builders poured concrete around an old silo form, and clad the structure with the stones to support a raised water tank.

The mostly retired engineers recalled when Dwight Eisenhower was president of Columbia University before he was elected US President in 1952.  A letter read by one alumnus told how Eisenhower came into a University class room and sat next to him when he was a student.  The audience shed tears as the alum described that he was a prisoner of war in World War II.  He remembered when he heard Eisenhower on the radio telling Nazi soldiers they would be fully prosecuted if they harmed American POW’s. He was honored years later to meet Eisenhower personally.

Also present was the wife of another Camp Columbia alum.  She served on the Board of Trustees when Columbia decided to sell the land to the State of Connecticut instead of to developers for a greater profit.

But the moderated joked that the actual acreage of the tract varies from 400 to 650 because it was so often surveyed by students, who came up with different answers!