Dartmo.

As Dartmo. enters its 17th year, the Dartmo.15 badge has been removed.

Over at Lamb & Rich, a post about putting off the proposed publication date for the book.

Thanks to Ameridane Press for the link to subway map. Thanks to Big Green Alert for the hat tip.

Thanks to DADA for including the book in the inaugural exhibition. Thanks for citations by Bryant Tolles, in Architecture & Academe: College Buildings in New England before 1860 (UPNE, 2011), and the Rauner Library Blog, in a post on Dartmouth Hall.

Thanks also to T. Barton Thurber for the citation to the Rich thesis in European art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (UPNE, 2008).

December of 2010 marks the unofficial beginning of this website’s fifteenth year. For the anniversary, I will be posting a bit about the history of the site and will try to clear the shelves of a few old and unfinished article ideas:

1. The Upper Valley Subway Map
2. The full text of William C. Hill’s Dartmouth Traditions (1901).
3. The Indian origins of “When Shall We Three Meet Again?”
4. A non-proposal for dividing Dartmouth into a federation of residential colleges
5. The gates of Dartmouth
6. The other Hopkins Center

Thanks to Alex Hanson for the coverage in the Valley News.

[Update 01.16.2011: Links to items 3 and 5 and coverage added; post made non-sticky and publication date changed from December 1, 2010 to January 16, 2011 to put it in order.]

[Update 01.22.2011: "This month" changed to "December of 2010" for clarity. Capitalization changed in titles.]

In the spring of 1995, I started posting webpages on a server where I had space as a student. Some of the pages had observations on Dartmouth architecture. This is an example:

After graduating, I put up some of the information on a new server (I think it was at alaska.net) and titled the collection “DArch.” The name came from a manila folder that held a few clippings related to Dartmouth architecture. I compiled notes on all the buildings I could learn about and put up what I called notes toward a catalog of Dartmouth buildings that December.

Versions of the site from the fall of 1999, winter of 2002, and fall of 2003 (all originally at meachams.com) show a search for a standard identity as the site becomes more bloglike:

I had no good answer to the question of how to pronounce the name DArch, and so I renamed the site Dartmo. in 2003 and gave it its own domain name.

Throughout I have tried to keep up a slow pace of posting bits of information about Dartmouth that I find interesting. The original posts were dated vaguely and posted in sequence by hand on two or three long web pages. After weblogs became popular, I turned each original post into a blog post and gave it an arbitrary sequential date.

The site kept a standard appearance from February of 2005 until April of 2010, when trying to maintain the site’s idiosyncracies within WordPress became too much of a hassle:

Over the years the site has been cited a few times, plagiarized a few times, and infringed upon a few times. The most popular element has been the “Notes toward a Catalog,” which was mostly written in 1995. It is now outdated, poorly-formatted, somewhat error-ridden, and largely supplanted by other sources. I would get rid of it if it weren’t linked by outside sites. The Campus Guide in print or on Google Books is a better source in most cases.

The best way to pull in information seems to be to put out information, and the site has helped not only with the Campus Guide (2008) but also with an ongoing Lamb & Rich monograph. Great information has come from a large number of people, especially Hanover-area residents not connected with the college. In fact the college has been fairly quiet: I have always hoped for scoops but cannot recall getting any. Once, a few years ago, the development office even started sending corrections through a third party. Dear Development Office: Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. Please send your corrections (and scoops) to dartmo@gmail.com.

What’s in the future? I expect to cut back even more on posting and devote more time to the book. The growth of the Web, particularly the advent of on-line construction press releases and newspaper articles, has made this site generic and untimely. I am still collecting information for a general encyclopedia along the lines of The Encyclopedia of South Carolina or The Encyclopedia of Chicago, but again that would be in print instead of on line. These days it is difficult to imagine the scale of the expansion that took place or was planned during the early 2000s, but if the pace of construction were to pick up again in Hanover, the news might be too interesting not to write about.

[Update 01.22.2011: Domain name info added.]

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.]

Dartmo. has a new appearance. The change allows readers to subscribe to an RSS feed and comment on posts, and it will make software upgrades easier. The old look was created in February of 2005. The new version is incidentally Flash-free as well.

[Update 04.18.2010: Comments actually working now.]

[Update 05.01.2010: Sidebar links on category pages repaired.]

Thanks to Alex Hanson for the mention in “In Hanover, Architects Note A 19th-Century Sensibility,” Valley News (22 November 2008).

The Lamb & Rich monograph page has become a separate blog. Posts related to that project will no longer appear here.

About 600 individual projects by Lamb & Wheeler/Rich have been identified for the book. Progress is occurring in the Manhattan projects, while the Colgate University/family projects remain mysterious. Illustrations are beginning to come in, and a tentative publication date of early 2012 has been established.

As mentioned in the Dartmouth Parents & Grandparents Fund newsletter (Winter 2009), the book project underway at the moment is a monograph on Lamb & Rich. This is the same project mentioned back in 2004 and will take a few more years to complete.

About 85 views have been added to Views of Dartmouth. The most interesting ones are the interior views of the Heating Plant (found in Views > East Side) and old photos of the west and south sides of the Green (in Views > West Side and > General Views).

At the beginning of June, Princeton Architectural Press published Dartmouth College: The Campus Guide. At the moment it is available from Barnes & Noble and the press.

As is the case with any book, a few errors have crept in, and they are being collected in this pdf document. Readers are encouraged to email comments, error sightings, and updates to dartmo@gmail.com.

A slightly revised version of the Old Division Football paper has been posted. The well-known photograph of students playing Dartmouth-rules football has been dated to 1874.

This site now permits comments regarding individual posts. They will be moderated and may take a day or more to appear.

[Update 10.06.2006: Comments are disabled because they do not work consistently.]

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.

Dartmo. is experimenting with an RSS feed, linked from the top of the page. New posts will be given meaningful titles from now on.

A method of categorizing and speeding news posts has been added to the site.   Each existing monthly post was edited slightly and backdated to the 28th of the month in which it originally was posted, with those posted before November 2000 given approximate dates.   Future posts will probably remain short enough to appear fully on this page.

[Updated February 14, 2005.]

Hopland altered slightly.

Charter pages altered slightly.

North Campus updated.

“Law School?” posted.

Amazon links added to this page.

This page altered slightly.

Indian Yell paper given its own page.