Traditions

First Forge

New students spend part of orientation week in Founders Hall pouring a small pewter keepsake — a flat disc stamped with that year’s class number — under the supervision of engineering faculty and a few opinionated seniors. It is, technically, an introduction to sand-casting. It is treated, less technically, as the moment a person becomes a Porter student rather than an admitted one. Most students keep the disc; a smaller number lose it within a month and buy a replacement at the campus store, which everyone pretends not to notice.

Millrace Week

The homecoming week each October is still called Millrace Week, a nod to the Porter Millwrights, the athletic teams’ name before a 1994 student vote renamed them the Ironclads. The week runs a full campus-and-downtown schedule: an alumni 5K along the Riverfront Trail, a Thursday-night Foundry pour open to the public in Founders Hall’s high bay, class reunions coordinated through the Foundation, and the football game itself on Saturday. Downtown businesses in the Depot District generally treat the week as their second-busiest of the year, after graduation weekend.

Fireworks over campus during Millrace Week, watched from the main lawn. — Fireworks over the quad close out the week.

How the Millwrights became the Ironclads

The 1994 vote is still a favorite trivia question at Millrace Week trivia night. The old Millwrights identity — a nod to the campus’s manual-training roots — had run since the founding era; the Ironclads name and the modern "P" mark replaced it after that student referendum.

A vintage Porter Millwrights football program from before the 1994 rebrand. — A Millwrights-era game program.

A black-and-white photo of the Porter Millwrights football team, shown from behind. — The Millwrights football team.

A 1994 campus newspaper clipping headlined Millwrights become Ironclads. — The campus paper covers the 1994 vote.

A faded Porter Millwrights pennant displayed beside a modern Ironclads pennant. — Then and now, in the athletics trophy case.

The Ring of Iron

On the Friday of Millrace Week, graduating seniors gather at dusk outside Founders Hall for the Ring of Iron — a short, unofficial ceremony where the graduating class forms a circle around the building’s original 1912 corner stone and each person places a hand on the person next to them for the length of one lap of the building, then goes home. Nobody has ever fully explained why it is done at dusk specifically, or why it started; the explanation offered most often by students is that it is easier to feel appropriately sentimental about your entire college experience when you cannot see everyone else’s face too clearly.

Foundry Friday

Every Friday afternoon during the semester, the student makerspace café in Founders Union — known simply as the Foundry — opens its tools and 3D printers to any student with an idea and no particular plan, staffed by work-study students who have gotten unusually good at troubleshooting other people’s CAD files. It is less a tradition with rules than a standing appointment the campus keeps with itself, and it is where a surprising number of student organization projects actually got built.

The fight over the fight song

UW–Porter Falls has had three fight songs since 1937 and, depending on which alumni newsletter you read, is either about to retire the current one or has just finished defending it for the third time. The Alumni Band still performs the 1961 version at Millrace Week out of what the athletics department describes, diplomatically, as “tradition” and the marching band describes, less diplomatically, as “not our decision.”