were at least seventeen fraternities at the university. From its founding until construction of the Quadrangle Dormitories, which started construction in 1895, the student body did not live in university-owned housing as, with a significant exception in the 18th century (see above content and Wikimedia image of the sketch of first Penn owned dormitory), there was none. Indeed, a significant portion of the undergraduate population commuted from Delaware Valley and a large number of students resided in the Philadelphia area. The medical school (with roughly half the students) was a significant exception to this trend as it attracted a more geographically diverse population of students. For example, in the 1850s when Penn's medical school accounted for two-thirds to three-quarters of the student body, over half of the population of the medical school was from the southern part of the United States. Penn had increasing need for housing in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the twentieth century due to a number of factors including its competition for students with peer institutions and active recruitment of foreign students. With respect to the desire to compete with peer institutions to attract students from across the nation, such was aptly reported by George Henderson, President of the College Class of 1889 (in his monograph he distributed to his classmates at their 20th reunion), which charted not only Penn's strong growth in acreage and number of buildings over the prior two decades but also the near-quadrupling in the size of the student body, which was accommodated, in part, by building of the Men's Dormitory, the Quadrangle. Henderson argued that building The Quad played a vital role in attracting students, and made an impassioned plea for its expansion: With respect to the active recruitment of foreign students, for example, Penn's first director of publicity translated a Penn recruiting brochure into Spanish and circulated approximately 10,000 copies throughout Latin America. The success of such efforts were evident in the fall of 1910 when Vice Provost Edgar Fahs Smith (who the following year would start a ten-year tenure as Penn's provost) formally welcomed to Penn students from 40 different nations at an annual party. Vice Provost Fahs spoke about how Penn wanted to "bring together students of different countries and break down misunderstandings existing between them". Since it was difficult to house the international students due to the then socially acceptable