Compensation Day is an annual College holiday, typically on November 1. On the College Calendar it is noted as “All Saints' Day.”

In 1867, a member of the class of 1869 broke their leg during a customary football match between the freshman and sophomore classes. Because of the increasingly injurious nature of the games, Trinity administration forbade their continuation, and gave the students a holiday to “compensate” for the loss.

On Compensation Day in 1869, costumed members of the class of 1873 ceremoniously buried a football on the far edge of campus – akin to a funeral procession – complete with mourners, lively music, orations, and poems. After the ball was laid to rest, beer and crackers provided by the freshman class was the order of the evening.

The Tablet from 1870 included a challenge to the class of 1874 to take up their predecessors' follies in the continuation of this new Compensation Day tradition. While Compensation Day remained on the College calendar, the football burying tradition did not last long, and in its place arose a “bum,” a party for the entire College given by the Freshmen.

During the early 1870s, students developed the tradition of “rushes,” which were decidedly more dangerous than their predecessor; these were scraps between the freshman and sophomore classes which were extremely physical and had varying iterations.

Early in the twentieth century, the holiday became All Saints' Day and Founders' Day; later it became Founders' and Benefactors' Day, and it was not until 1943 that the holiday disappeared from the College Calendar. Actually, the holiday had not been formally observed after 1929, but in 1946 Mrs. C. Morgan Aldrich, Bishop Brownell's great-granddaughter, presented the College with a portrait of the founder and that year the tradition was revived as the occasion of the portrait's presentation.

The History of Trinity College (1967) by Glenn Weaver, pp. 165, 329.

Trinity Tablet, 10/20/1870.

Trinity Tablet, 11/15/1869.

Trinity Tablet, October 1868.