Dartmo.

The Alumni Magazine published two letters critical of a rendering of the proposed Inn addition. (It is not clear that the rendering represents a final design.)

One writer laments the lack of a railing for putting one’s feet upon, although the rendering shows clearly that the existing railing, located within the arcade that screens the recessed porch where the rocking chairs are, will be retained.

The same letter called the design “nontraditional,” and that might be accurate. The most prominent part of the addition will be a new porte-cochere, and the rendering seems to show it as a Modernist structure. But look at the Inn itself: it features an uncharacteristic mansard roof; a lack of shutters; the omission of traditional building details such as quoining, lintels, or sills; and the absence of columns or much reference to the Classical orders. The main block of the Inn was designed by Hilton architect William B. Tabler and completed in 1967.

Although Dartmouth seems to take some pride in having a campus without any gates, it could still benefit from the exercise of defining a campus boundary and identifying the major entrances to the academic precinct. A sketch from several years ago:

This is all fairly obvious, but it does not seem to receive much attention in writing. The greatest coherence (and the greatest support for the idea of walkability) seems to be achieved by reducing the number of gates and pulling them inward.

The only site where two gates would stand close to each other is at the southwest corner of the Green. Pulling the gates toward the center would allow them to share a single gatepost on the Green itself, but that would detract significantly from the Green and would interfere with the tree on the corner. Here, the gates should spring from the Inn and C&G (south gate) and from Collis and C&G (west gate):

Again, this is not a proposal, and Dartmouth does not need any more* gates.

However, if this sort of project were built, and if it were differentiated from its direct ancestor, Charles McKim’s wonderful gates at Harvard, the builders couldn’t go wrong with a set massive rusticated granite piers supporting a timber truss. This would refer to the Connecticut river bridges, especially Rufus Graves’s arched truss of the late eighteenth century.

——
* Tuck Drive was built with a brick gateway at each end. The lower example survives. More recently, Scully-Fahey Field was erected with a large freestanding gateway.

Download

Download a pdf version of William Carroll Hill’s 1901 book, Dartmouth Traditions.

About the Book

William Carroll Hill (1875-1943?), of Nashua, N.H., received his Bachelor of Letters degree, a degree offered only between 1884 and 1904, in 1902. He was the historian of his class and wrote the Chronicles section of the the 1902 Class Day volume, a book that the printer gave the appearance as Dartmouth Traditions. Hill became an antiquarian, genealogist, and historian and apparently wrote a history of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Dartmouth Traditions was published when Hill was a junior. The book is not really about traditions and probably would be better titled Dartmouth Worthies. It is a collection of essays written by students and alumni. While the essays on Daniel Webster and other known personages are not very useful, some essays appear the contain information that is only available in this book. Examples are the report on the investigation into the history of the Lone Pine and the first-person account of the drowning death of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son.

About this Project

The transcription of this somewhat hard-to-find book began in 2003. The book has since become available in Google Books, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the project. The Google Books version has the great advantage of reproducing the attractive typography of the original, but its computer transcription is not as accurate as that of the version presented here.

[Update 05.13.2011: The Rauner Library Blog has a post on Hill, highlighting the Stowe episode.]

[Update 12.21.2010: Link to pdf posted.]

One of the distinctive features of Dartmouth-Rules Football, a local soccer of the mid-nineteenth century, was the fact that the kickoff was unidirectional. Although scoring was permitted on either the east or west side of the Green, the kickoff (called “the warn”) always went eastward from the spot where second base would be located during baseball season.

The rule might have been motivated by politics, courtesy, or efficiency. While there was nothing breakable in the college yard east of the Green, a row of professors’ houses stood on the west side.

The unidirectional kickoff was brought to mind recently with the news that the rules for the Illinois vs. Northwestern game at Wrigley Field had been changed to require all offensive plays to drive toward the west end zone. Although scoring was permitted in both end zones, when possession changed, the teams switched sides. Planners made this modification to reduce the number of plays taking in the east end zone, which is cramped by the baseball stadium’s right-field wall.

(Old Division Football basically evolved into the Football Rush, which can be seen at the 8:26 mark in this 1947 film. The arbitrary violence and utter lack of anything resembling game play suggest why the annual freshman-sophomore event later was turned into a tug-of-war and eventually was eliminated.)

Various tidbits not related to construction:

• Google has supplemented its car-based Street View coverage of Hanover and Lebanon by sending in a tricycle-mounted camera (The Dartmouth). New images will be up next year. Meanwhile some places, such as the University of Texas, are getting 45-degree aerial views, presumably taken from an airplane.
• Professor Schweitzer’s Occom Circle Project involves digitizing and posting Samson Occom’s writings (The Dartmouth, Dartmouth Now). The project doesn’t seem to have a page yet.
• Rauner’s blog has a copy of an early-1900s broadside advertising a ban on nude swimming near Ledyard Bridge, and a bit on the legendary Doc Benton.
• As everybody knows, BlitzMail is going away. An oblitzuary.
• Ask Dartmouth writes about the Old Pine Lectern.
• Ken Burns wrote in American Heritage that his favorite baseball photograph is an 1882 image showing a Dartmouth-Harvard game on the northwest corner of the Green. Photographer Joseph Mehling has paired that photo with shots from a recent softball game on the northeast corner, with President Kim pitching.
• This excellent fantastical map of the campus by Matthieu and Zachary Pierce is called “Dartmouth Dreaming.”
• Administrative reports and presidential announcements, such as the Reaccreditation Self-Study, now regularly mention the planning for the 2019 Quartomillennium.
• The Dartmouth Sports site has been redesigned and is now a little less busy.

This has probably been mentioned here before: “Dartmouth by Air,” a video by the Media Production Group, is worth watching.

The red jeep visible alongside the Green in this postcard appears in a 1954 film. Bill Miles '56 notes in the comments that he played Freddy and that Bob Black '56 played Eddy in the film. The Alpha Delta house stands in for a dormitory in the serenade scene.

Rauner’s blog has several photos of skijoring at Carnival.

Transcripts of President Hopkins’s oral-history interviews from 1958 to 1964 are now available (see also Rauner blog).

Steve Waterhouse '65 has written A Passion for Skiing about Dartmouth’s contribution to the skiing industry (Vail Today).

As the irregular grassy plot in front of the River Cluster becomes better defined and and is transformed into a front door to the Tuck School (through the school’s Whittemore Hall), the space needs a name.

Landscape architects Saucier & Flynn have mentioned “Whittemore Green” in town planning meetings (pdf).

The article on elms in Dartmouth Life has an interesting tidbit about town-gown negotiation: the College takes over the care of each elm that the Town has planted on a street that runs through the campus when the tree reaches “a certain stature.”

Artist Peter Irniq (Wikipedia) erected an inuksuk (Wikipedia) on McNutt’s lawn for the Hood Museum (Dartmouth Life; Hood News).

His coat of arms features an inuksuk:

(The Hood has been busy lately, also acquiring, at Sotheby’s, Pompeo Batoni’s 1756 portrait of William Legge, the second earl of Dartmouth.)

Don’t forget the ’66 cam atop the Inn and the one on Baker Tower.

A large amount of interest in the history of American football is accompanying the fiftieth anniversary of the Ivy League. The Big Green Alert Blog has linked (more) to trailers for two new films about Ivy football: The League and For Love and Honor, which is based on Mark F. Bernstein’s Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.

Both films appear to give some credit to the myth that football began in 1869 when Princeton played Rutgers. (The trailer for the first film mentions that game; the book upon which the second is based also mentions the game.) As has been noted here before, although the teams called their game “foot ball,” the fact that the British still call soccer by that name should be a tipoff: the teams were actually playing soccer, which was and is also known as Association Football. Rutgers acknowledges that the game was FA football and not rugby football in its website about the game.

Although the teams that played in the 1869 soccer match might be called the first American football teams, since they later switched rules to play rugby against other schools, the match itself was not half as significant as the 1874 Harvard-McGill rugby match or the 1875 Harvard-Yale rugby match, either of which is more properly known as the birth of intercollegiate football.

A somewhat disjointed article on Dartmouth’s local pre-soccer form of soccer, Old Division Football, has been posted.

The only information of any interest outside Dartmouth might be the conclusions, obvious enough but still not widely known, that:

1. The first soccer game in the world between two universities seems to have been the Princeton-Rutgers game of 1869. Oxford and Cambridge did not play until 1872. (The Football Association wrote the rules of “soccer” in 1863, and Rutgers was using those rules, possibly with slight variations.) The story that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American gridiron football game before rugby had arrived is so obviously incorrect that it is hard to imagine why it is still told, yet it is the official line at Rutgers. Back then, soccer was called “football” and allowed the use of the hands, just not running with the ball.

2. The first college football game in the U.S. was the McGill-Harvard rugby game of 1874. College football and pro football as we know them today are descendants of the rugby that McGill played. The first college football game between U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875. Princeton, Rutgers, and the other schools that had been playing soccer dropped it and switched to rugby. All American football is played under the rules of rugby as used by Harvard and Yale and modified by them and their later competitors during the succeeding decades.

Errata for the first page of the enjoyable Dartmouth College Football: Green Fields of Autumn by David Shribman and Jack DeGange (page 10):

1. “Old Division,” later known as “Whole Division,” was Dartmouth’s distinctive football game in the mid-19th century.
   Should read:
   “Old Division,” later known as “Whole Division,” was Dartmouth’s distinctive soccer-style game by the mid-19th century.

2. The “field,” originally the entire campus, was later narrowed to “the college yard,” now the Green.
   Should read:
   The field was the Green.

3. The buildings in the background of this photograph (including the Church of Christ) that had not already been moved or replaced were relocated from the north end of the Green when Baker Library was built in the 1920s
   Should read:
   The houses in the background of this photograph were relocated from the north end of the Green before Baker Library was built in the 1920s, and the Church of Christ burned down in 1931.

The first and last notes are merely pickiness regarding imprecisions (though the implication that Old Division was related to American Football would be inaccurate). The second note deserves some clarification. The College Yard was and is east of the Green, between College Street and Dartmouth Hall. The “Campus,” of course, was what’s now called the Green.

A few words about the word campus:

1. The word campus as used in the U.S. today refers to the grounds of a college or university.
2. The earliest known use of the proper noun the Campus in a collegiate context occurred in 1774 at Princeton, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.   Charles C. Beatty wrote Enoch Green on January 31, 1774: “Last week to show our patriotism, we gathered all the steward’s winter store of tea, and having made a fire in the Campus, we there burnt near a dozen pounds, tolled the bell and made many spirited resolves.”
3. It does not follow that the meaning of the proper noun the Campus in the eighteenth century is the same as the meaning of the general term campus today.   Yes, the word was used first at Princeton; yes, the word refers a college grounds today; no, it did not mean that in 1774 or even in 1874.   Therefore the OED is incorrect to the extent that it attributes a present-day definition of campus to the 1774 use of the Campus.

   The OED may be forgiven for imprecision, but its citation to Beatty’s letter unfortunately has given rise to the myth that campus as a word for college grounds was used in the eighteenth century and began at Princeton. Alexander Leitch, in A Princeton Companion (1978) wrote that the use of campus “to mean the grounds of a college originated at Princeton”; Turner repeated the myth in Campus: An American Planning Tradition (1984); Barbara Hadley Stanton repeated it (citing the OED) in “Cognitive Standards and the Sense of Campus,” Places 17, no 1 (Spring 2005), 38.

4. On the contrary, the proper name the Campus, in keeping with its Latin meaning of “the field,” referred to a more-or-less bounded plot of land, a particular and identifiable collegiate urban space (at Princeton or, later, at other colleges).   The word did not refer to the grounds or real estate or physical plant of a college.   Beatty implied this in his sentence by writing that he “made a fire in the Campus” (using a sense of the word “in” that remains current in Britain, where a car is “in the street,” not “on the street”).   The site where the fire took place was a particular field in front of Nassau Hall, and if the fire had been on a different part of the college grounds, Beatty would not have said “in the Campus.”   In other words, he did not use the term to contrast two fires that might be on-campus and off-campus, which would be the implication if he had used today’s meaning of campus.

   Albert Matthews’ article on the use of the word campus in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 3 (1897) apparently suggested that Princeton President John Witherspoon was struck on his arrival by Princeton’s flat, unenclosed front field and introduced the Classical term to describe it.   This explanation of the arrival of the word fits with Beatty’s meaning, and it supports the continued reference to that particular plot in later years: the Princeton Trustees referred to “the back campus of the College” (1787) and “the front Campus” (1807) according to Leitch.

   James Finch, Travels in the United States and Canada (1833) used the word in print first, writing “In front of the College is a fine campus ornamented with trees,” again according to A Princeton Companion. Nothing could make this original, narrow meaning clearer than Benjamin Homer Hall’s definition in College Words and Customs (1856): At Princeton, “the college yard is denominated the Campus.”

   In 1869, a Dartmouth student wrote that a tent had appeared “on the campus opposite the Dartmouth Hotel” (The Dartmouth 3, no. 10 (November 1869), 393); an 1883 oration was directed to “this dear old exercise ground,” cheering “the glory of this long-to-be-remembered Campus” (“wah—hoo—wah! C—A—M—P—U—S!”) (William Edward Cushman, 1883, “Campus Oration” in “Exercises of Class Day at Dartmouth College, Tuesday, June 26, 1883″ (Hanover, N.H.: Class of 1883, 1883), 22); and into the 1930s, a student could write that a parade had marched to the President’s House and then back “to the campus” to set off a bonfire (Richard N. Campen, 11 November 1930 letter excerpted in in Edward Connery Lathem and David M. Shribman, eds., Miraculously Builded in Our Hearts: A Dartmouth Reader (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, distributed by University Press of New England, 1999), 136).

   Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in Three Centuries of Harvard (1936) that since Princeton started calling its field “the campus,” “[o]ne by one every other American college has followed suit, until Harvard alone has kept her Yard.”

5. No one has yet demonstrated how the meaning of the word shifted from the proper name of a college field “to mean the grounds of a college.”   It might have happened at Princeton, which seems to have been using the word longest.   Klauder and Wise noted that such a shift was taking place nationally when they wrote of campus: “This too has changed its meaning as the buildings have expanded and increased with the growth of the institutions. It has now a more extended meaning and comprises all the centrally located property of the institution” (Charles Z. Klauder & Herbert C. Wise, College Architecture in America (1929), 4).   The transition was relatively late at Dartmouth, where the old meaning of the word did not die out until the mid-twentieth century.   Though some had begun calling the bounded plot at the center of Dartmouth “the Green” by 1809 (William Tully in Oliver S. Haywood and Elizabeth H. Thomson, eds., The Journal of William Tully, Medical Student at Dartmouth 1808-1809 (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), 23, writing “[t]he green, I should judge to be but little short of a quarter of a mile square”), that term did not dominate until perhaps the 1940s.   Perhaps as the general term campus became popular nationally, it made Dartmouth’s old name for its space confusing, requiring a replacement.
6. Today, the term campus is used everywhere almost exclusively in its broad, college-grounds meaning.   It is even spreading abroad to universities that existed before the word was adopted in a collegiate context.   Older uses survive, however.   Along with its recurrence in songs (“the long, cool shadows floating on the campus”), it recurs in the name of the main snow sculpture for Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival, which is called officially the Center-of-Campus Statue, a reference to its site at the center of the Green rather than to its site near the center of the college grounds.

[Updated 09.19.2005, 09.30.2005, 10.01.2005.]

Wayne Cripps makes available dozens of photos of Elms of Dartmouth, including photos of the two most important ones: the Hikers’ Elm at the southwest corner of the Green, and the Parkhurst Elm.

Dogs really are allowed to sit in on lectures.   According to the Dartmouth Administrative Guide, non-messy dogs are allowed in non-dormitory buildings if they are in the care of a keeper.   The regulation does not mention dogs that run free and are not “creating a nuisance.”

To control pedestrians better, the school is giving the Senior Fence an ell shape this month by moving part of it to the south end of the Green, on the same corner, as a press release explains.   The original part of the fence dates to the turn of the century (the original, practical 1836 fence came down in 1893).   In 1899, students suggested that a second fence for sitting on should occupy the west side of the Green, indicating dissatisfaction with the slightly earlier Senior Fence on the north half of the east side of the Green (“Such a [new] fence would not detract from the value of the senior fence which has never met purpose for which it was designed,” The Dartmouth [20 April 28, 1899]: 449) and a view of ca. 1914 shows the current replacement, a double row of fences south of the middle of the west side of the Green.   Plaques indicate that donors later extended that fence southward to give it its present form.

The Dartmouth is reporting that the College soon will relocate the Senior Fence south to the corner of Main and Wheelock. Surely they don’t mean it’s being moved, rather just extended?

The College proposes to redevelop the block south of East South Street with new office and apartment buildings, The Dartmouth reports.   No report on the school’s plans for preservation of the nineteenth century houses it owns on the block is available.