Dartmo.

Jonathan Good wrote a proposal for a heraldic coat of arms for Dartmouth College in 1995. This website has linked to Good’s pamphlet at several locations over the years and is happy to host it once again.

As the proposal explains, the new symbol would be an adjunct to the existing coat of arms rather than a replacement for it.

The celebration of Dartmouth’s 250th anniversary in 2019 would be a fine time to adopt the coat of arms. At the last big college celebration of this kind, the 1969 bicentennial, the school adopted the lone pine device that has since become widespread.

The school might even petition the College of Arms for a grant of honorary arms, as has been done by George Washington University and Hampden-Sydney College.

A few of Scott Meacham’s own cut-and-paste efforts to render the proposed arms:

[Update 11.30.2010: GWU link corrected.]

The Tuck School has a gallery of photos of Sachem Village, the married-student housing site south of Hanover.

One 1946 photo shows the earliest Sachem buildings when they still occupied their original location in Hanover, behind Thayer School. Some or all of the prefabricated buildings had begun as wartime housing for shipyard workers. The view from the west shows how the lower of the two types of buildings were arranged in a circle called Wigwam Circle. This quick composite of stills from a 1946 film linked from the Dartmouth Film Archive shows Wigwam Circle from the east looking west:

The dorms that later occupied the site were initially called Wigwam Circle and later the River Cluster.

The two-story buildings visible in the rear of the 1946 photo linked at the top of this post appear again in a 1954 photo at the current location of Sachem Village. (I believe some of the other prefab buildings for married students ended up north of town at Rivercrest.)

Sachem Village has been redeveloped in recent years (see Trumbull-Nelson and Pathways Consulting), and I have no idea whether any of its wartime buildings remain. It seems unlikely.

To confuse matters, the name of the present Sachem Village appears to have come from Dartmouth’s other group of prefab buildings for married students — the counterpart to Wigwam Circle — which stood on Lebanon Street next to Hanover High. Here is a composite of stills from the same 1946 film showing this housing project, the original “Sachem Village”:

A 1947 film from the same collection has some good closeups of Wigwam Circle and the original Sachem Village on Lebanon Street at the 8:57 mark.

[Update 11.20.2010: Images and links to film added.]
[Update 11.21.2010: Link to 1947 film added.]

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.

Dartmouth Now posted an update on campus construction back in June. The first photo (larger version on Flickr) shows the busy east end of the Life Sciences Center.

There is also a podcast covering the LSC and sustainability, and the webcam continues to show the state of the work.

Dartmouth Now, by the way, is from the Office of Public Affairs and appears to be the new and peppier face of the college on the Web, up since about January.

Students built the original Titcomb Cabin on Gilman Island, downriver from the bridge, in 1952. It was a replacement for several Ledyard Canoe Club cabins whose sites were being submerged by the river as the water rose behind the new Wilder Dam. It seems that the power company even helped with the construction.

Someone burned Titcomb last year (The Dartmouth) and a group mostly made up of students has started the work of erecting a replacement (The Dartmouth).

The Rebuilding Titcomb blog has some superb photos. Joe Mehling’s photos at Dartmouth’s Flickr stream show Safety & Security using their boat to help raft logs to the island.

[Update 09.25.2010: The Dartmouth has an update.]

As a rough parallel to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article on alumni architects (a post here), Thayer School’s Dartmouth Engineer magazine has an article in which eight alumni designers speak about design.

The focus of this particular article is product design rather than building design. Thayer School, incidentally, was founded as the Thayer School of Architecture and Civil Engineering (see the 1868 Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Education) but has always focused on the engineering part of its mandate. The school dropped the word “architecture” from its name early on.

Professor Pease’s book about Dr. Seuss, Theodor SEUSS Geisel, is getting a lot of press (Valley News, The Dartmouth).

The Dartmouth has a story on Eli Burakian 2000 and the publication of his book of photographs, Moosilauke: Portrait of a Mountain.

Lots more on the mountain is available at MtMoosilauke.com.

• Keep checking the Six South Street Hotel blog for construction photos.
• The New York Times had an article back in 2008 on the legal incentives to identifying “ancient roads” in Vermont. It brings to mind the observations of Christopher Lenney in Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England (2005).
• The Hanover Conservation Council provides maps and other information on sites including Mink Brook and Fullington Farm, the latter in the news because it is the site of the boathouse of the Hanover High crew.
• The St. Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, just a few miles away from Hanover, has purchased Blow-Me-Down Farm (Valley News).
• Alumni Relations has a gallery of campus trees. Number 7 is the Parkhurst Elm.

The May/June 2010 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine focuses on architecture and includes “Alumni Opinion: Return of the Critic” by William Morgan and “Architectural Digest” by C.J. Hughes. The latter article profiles alumni architects and makes the case for the quality of Dartmouth’s architectural education. I would like to read a history of that education some time, going back through instructors Banwell and the Hunters to Larson and Keyes and eventually, in the 1850s, to the Chandler School.

The Chandler School, on the vacant lot south of Blunt. The top floor of the rear addition was a skylit drafting studio. The building was expanded twice by alumni architects, both of whom had studied architecture inside. The frame building at left is Hubbard Hall, a temporary dormitory.

[Update 06.15.2010: The DAM article is up.]

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).

In Avatar (2009), colonist Jake is surprised to learn that some of the native Na’vi speak English. He asks and is told that they learned English at Dr. Augustine’s School. This exchange mirrors one in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) in which Cora asks Hawkeye how he learned to speak English, and he replies:

My father sent Uncas & I to Reverend Wheelock’s school when I was ten.

(From the Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe script, not in Cooper’s original — although Susan F. Cooper discusses Wheelock in her introduction to later editions such as the 1876 edition.)

The US News article on college Olympians (see also USA Today and Dartmouth’s recap) notes that Dartmouth’s is the first collegiate ski team. Another significant tradition is the the ski team’s organizational existence outside of the athletic department. The team is part of the outing club instead, following a 19th-century way of running things.

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, now on line with archives back to July 2008, has issues featuring the DOC Centennial (see also the Congressional recognition) and the Olympics.

Dartmouth Life has an article on Carnival posters that mentions Winter Carnival: A Century of Dartmouth Posters (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, forthcoming fall 2010).

Hanover engineer and architect Edgar H. Hunter, a 1901 graduate, designed promotional posters for the state’s ski industry, including one from 1935 pictured in E. John B. Allen’s New Hampshire on Skis (Arcadia, 2002), 2. His son Ted Hunter ’38 was an Olympic skier and also an architect.

The Dartmouth printed a short series of articles on college properties outside of town, including Grant, the Organic Farm, Morton Farm, and most notably the Minary Center. More on the equestrian team.

This looks interesting: Professor Colin Calloway’s The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).

(Curiously, the Press still uses Scotford’s short-lived 1960s shield rather than the standard MacDonald version of 1944/1957.)

The Neukom Institute was rumored last year to be considering a request for an addition to Sudikoff.

Ledyard Canoe Club plans to rebuild Titcomb Cabin, which burned last spring. The logs will be put in the river at the Organic Farm and rafted down to Gilman Island. This will be the closest thing to a log drive seen on this stretch of the Connecticut in many years.

David Hooke (Reaching That Peak, 1987) gave a “smoke talk” in Commons on the Outing Club’s history. The Dartmouth reports that “smoke talk” refers to the club’s journal Woodsmoke, but it might also refer to the informal lectures of that name that took place in College Hall at the turn of the century.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates that, although not mentioning it, helps explain their Berry Library project.

Check out the buildings in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream.

The Dartmouth is doing a weekly articles on Dartmouth out-of-town, starting with the riding center at Morton Farm.

Dartmouth is offering for rent the second level of the 1910s library stacks addition to Eleazar Wheelock’s house. This could make a good society hall:

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

Rauner’s blog describes a fantastic horizontal-scrolling map of the Connecticut River at Hanover (image). It was created by Robert Fletcher around the turn of the twentieth century and was found among some records of the Hanover Water Works Co. that the library received recently. The shallow box containing the map is portable, and the map contains a number of notes on related facts.

This map could be scanned, stitched together, overlaid with a current aerial, and made into a fascinating website. A lot of the landmarks noted by Fletcher have probably been under several feet of water since Wilder Dam raised the river in the 1950s; yet the River was not pristine in Fletcher’s time, and he notes that the low-water level at Ledyard Bridge was raised by six feet by the dam at Olcott Falls (Wilder).

A UNH news story notes that one of the large and notable relief maps of the state created by Dartmouth’s Professor Hitchcock in the late 1870s is being restored. This particular map came to UNH in 1894, so it is probably not the one depicted on the east wall of the Butterfield Museum after that building opened in 1899.

The college radio station turned 50 in 2008 and has a photographic history on line. One of the photos from the 1990s shows Brett Haber, now the sports director for the CBS station in Washington, D.C. Brett, this is as good a time as any to apologize for throwing out your ski boots while cleaning the attic of Sigma Nu in 1992.