V. Greek Letter Societies 1894-1920 | The wooden first generation

    To return to the turn of the century, when a shift in iconography took place: Following Alpha Delta Phi's much earlier implementation of the residential program (and C&G's occupation of an existing house the previous year) Kappa Kappa Kappa occupied the former Parker family residence (1868-70) in 1894 (Figs. 17, 17a). The appearance of the house stood in stark contrast to the society buildings then existing, but the domestic symbolism may have been unintentional. Kappa Kappa Kappa had in fact planned to erect its own building, for which the Hon. James H. Odlin roused interest and helped raise funds. The goal was a $15,000 structure with a hall, library, parlors and a few suites of rooms.¹²⁵ If elevation drawings existed, they are now lost, and we can only wonder if the society intended to continue its former mysterious mode. (The society did add a nearly-windowless "goat room" to the rear of its house.)

	17. 1868-70 Parker House at 22 N. Main St. as occupied by Kappa Kappa Kappa in 1894, view to the south (Barrett, 83).
	17a. 1868-70 Parker House at 22 N. Main St. as occupied by Kappa Kappa Kappa after 1894, view to the northwest (postcard).

    After these initial moves, the shift among Greek-letter fraternities toward domestic models took off in a big way and reached its greatest intensity around 1908. The fraternities that had been headquartered in halls began to move into houses with residential accommodations, so that after about 1910 only a minority of the College's organizations held their meetings on Main Street. Most organizations bought existing buildings, though a few built their own houses. Ashton Willard wrote in 1897 of this shift on a national scale,

More recently another form of building has come into vogue. It does not look in the least like a tomb, but much more what the real estate agents term a "desirable country residence." The building contains not only a meeting room for the society, but suites of lodging rooms, studies with bedrooms attached, for the use of the students who happen to be members of the society.^125a

    Why did this move to houses happen? The author of the 1895 American University Magazine article on Dartmouth fraternities wrote:

The idea of chapter houses as it came from other colleges was discussed by many of the chapters, and the prevalent belief was that a chapter house would tend to isolate its occupants from the rest of the college, or worse still, might create factons in college affairs. The Dartmouth man has always looked with abhorrence upon anything savoring of an aristocracy. Gradually there has come a change in the attitude of the students toward this question, not that they have weakend in principle, but it appears that the chapter house does not destroy the unity of the College..¹²⁶

    The move also mirrored a national change in meaning: Societies had been shifting to an outlook that valued socializing more than secrecy, the fellowship of meetings more than the literary aspect. The new emphasis was on the good times one could have in college and the associations one could make. During this period the collegiate ideal was returning after a period of German-influenced universitization, and fraternities experienced a great growth in popularity.¹²⁷ Ashton Willard observed this change in 1897, noting that now "the students who belong to these organizations have close social relationship with each other, and find it agreeable to be quartered under the same roof." Willard insightfully commented on the architectural component of this shift:

The Yale model of the secret society hall was for a certain period extensively adopted at other colleges; that is, the idea of constructing the building so that it would obviously proclaim on the outside what it was to be used for was adhered to. More recently another form of building has come into vogue. It does not look in the least like a tomb, but much more like what the real estate agents term a "desirable country residence." The building contains not only a meeting room for the society, but suites of lodging rooms, studies with bedrooms attached, for the use of the students who happen to be members of the society.¹²⁸

The original purpose of the Dartmouth societies was to develp a literary taste; this is still an important part of their work, but ability has long ceased to be the first requisite to membership, and men are seldom elected to any of the societies who are not regarded as congenial associates. The College now offers an excellent English course to all who elect it, and the fraternities supplement this by having regular meetings in which literary work is encouraged and by holding prize speaking contests during the winter. The social part of fraternity life at Dartmouth is unlike that of most colleges, though it exists in various forms.¹²⁹

Heald added that students from other colleges had complained about a lack of fraternity spirit at Dartmouth; students apparently placed college first and chapter second.

    A number of specific factors influenced the shift to houses at Dartmouth. Rising enrollments were one. Between 1892 and 1899 the total undergraduate enrollment more than doubled to 627;¹³⁰ by 1906 enrollment was climbing more rapidly than in any New England college. Enrollments leapt 14% that year, to 1065 students.¹³¹ Fraternities have a practical benefit of housing people when an expanding school cannot cope, and many schools at this time relied on fraternities this way.¹³² The College tried to keep pace by building twelve new dormitories double-quick between 1897 and 1913. The enrollment growth assured alumni of demand for the homes they planned to give their old organizations, and occupying a house was a way to compete with other societies for membership and prestige. A growing number of Dartmouth students were also used to living in boarding houses rather than in dormitories, and had a greater wealth than in earlier periods. Finally, fires forced many fraternities out of their old haunts, especially the Tontine, which burned in 1887, but also including the Balch House (Davison Block) which burned in 1900 and the western Bridgman Block, which burned in 1906.

    This growth in fraternities certainly did not go unnoticed by the College, and the potential for overelaborate houses that could take resources and attention from the institution unnerved the Trustees and others. The College saw a danger in the new houses and the potential they promised for what was happening elsewhere, for the existence the separate dining facilities and de facto private dormitories that segregated their members into cliques. Some schools approved of such separation: At Stanford fraternities built or bought houses around the campus, each creating a domestically-scaled residence where a small number of students could live and dine together in familial camaraderie. Thus the campus planner Frederick Law Olmsted's original idea for a cottage system at the school came to fruition in one form.¹³³ At Dartmouth, however, the Trustees regulated the organizations to prevent such separation: in 1902 they decided that, in the interest of democracy, no more than fourteen members could live in a fraternity, and that no house could have a dining facility.¹³⁴ These rules made their way into the deeds for Webster Avenue properties that the school sold to societies.

    Dartmouth organizations generally bought family residences, though a few bought such buildings as a church (Fig. 18), a hotel, and a nurses' dormitory that the hospital's School of Nursing had once used.¹³⁵ Some organizations bought houses that another fraternity had already colonized once. Wooden structures were the rule, though houses of a variety of ages served the societies: The Delta Tau Delta House was at most seven years old when the organization bought it,¹³⁶ while Delta Kappa Epsilon bought the oldest house in town, a Colonial tavern.¹³⁷ The buildings that fraternities bought also represented the stylistic variety of the town's housing stock, from mansard-roofed homes to clapboarded vernacular buildings. Over the exteriors the organizations had little control and usually limited themselves to filling in between dormers or installing an addition at the rear. When an organization had the means to aggrandize its building, this usually meant aiming for a more Colonial appearance, perhaps by adding columns to the entrance. In perhaps the most drastic alteration Sigma Phi Epsilon had College architect Jens Larson remodel the superstructure of the 1883 Sherman House into a half-timbered showpiece (1928). Most societies however did not alter the exteriors of their houses significantly, leaving the changes to the interior. Here the societies had family parlors and servants' stairs to contend with: high priorities were to create a Goat Room or meeting room,¹³⁸ a lounging room, and a bunk room where a number of members could sleep.

18. 1887 former Catholic Church on East South St., once occupied by Pi Lambda Phi (author).

    More visibly, five organizations built houses to their own designs. While displaying no unity of style, they were universally domestic in character. The first two were what we might call "Colonial." Phi Delta Theta's 1902 completion of its Webster Avenue house (now Phi Delta Alpha) marks the beginning and the high point of the purpose-built houses (Fig. 19). The ostentatious and grandly-scaled house resembles the 1737-40 Hancock House in Boston or the 1754 Lindens originally in Danvers,¹³⁹ or more likely the 1893 Massachusetts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition (Fig. 20). Following Phi Delta Theta, Beta Theta Pi built a 1903 house on Sanborn Lane (now Fairbanks South) that College architect Charles Alonzo Rich had actually designed earlier, in 1893 (Fig. 21). Beta Theta Pi exhibits a milder version of the Colonial than the Phi, and on a much smaller scale.

	19. 1902 Phi Delta Theta/Phi Delta Alpha House on the north side of Webster Ave. (Dartmouth College Library).
	20. 1893 Massachusetts State Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago. ("State Buildings," The Vanished City, [1893]).
	21. 1903 Beta Theta Pi House on the north side of Sanborn Lane, today Fairbanks South/Tucker Foundation (postcard).

    A trio of other houses followed and did not follow the Colonial so closely, and two even borrowed different flavors of "cottage," seeking to appear cosy, inviting, even rural. Professors Homer Keyes and R.L. Taylor designed the 1907-08 Psi Upsilon on a West Wheelock Street (Fig. 22), a building that The Dartmouth described as "Dutch colonial." On the first floor were a reception room and hall, a living room, and a billiard room that was constructed lower than the rest of the floor "in accordance with the English style." Those rooms were fitted up "in the German club style," while the other three floors accommodated twelve men in five suites, with living rooms and studies in a white Colonial finish. The design included the surrounding landscape, for the building was to have an English hedge and flower gardens.¹⁴⁰ The low-slung Kappa Sigma, on the other hand, seems more closely allied with the ideals of the Arts & Crafts movement and the Greene Brothers in California: it had a stucco exterior finish, shingled roof, exposed rafter-ends, and eight-over-eight windows. The building went up on Webster Avenue adjacent the existing Phi Delta Theta in 1915 (Fig. 23).¹⁴¹ On the other side of Phi Delta Theta contractor Edward Dutile of Wilder built the rather Georgian Sigma Chi house of 1911-12 (Fig. 24). An architect named Ashton of Lawrence, Mass. was the father of a fraternity member and designed the building.¹⁴²

	22. 1907-08 Psi Upsilon House on the north side of West Wheelock St. (postcard).
	23. Map of Webster Ave. in 1915 (author, after Sanborn map). [1894 Map | 1937 Map]
	24. 1911-12 Sigma Chi House on the north side of Webster Ave. (postcard).

    These buildings were not easy for a student club to build, and they took time. Beta members in the early 1890s held a toast to the building of a chapter house in the near future¹⁴³ and already owned the property on which they would build; yet the building was not built for ten years. Charles Rich also designed a house for Delta Kappa Epsilon, which even bought land on Webster Avenue, but the organization sold the land to Kappa Sigma and seems to have dropped the plans. Psi Upsilon as well owned its plot for at least seven years before it began building.¹⁴⁴

    Now that the societies were moving out of halls, the central node of activity that was upper Main Street began to disperse. The organizations were spreading out into neighborhoods and abandoning the group identity that the commercial blocks must have given them. Some eventually went as far north as Maynard Street or even Occom Ridge; some went as far south as South Street almost to the current Howe Library; today's Panarchy (Fig. 25) represents the western boundary. Houses existed in small groups at North Main and Elm, where Sigma Nu (Fig. 26) joined Kappa Kappa Kappa; or on East Wheelock Street, where Chi Phi (Fig. 27) joined Alpha Delta Phi. A few houses mentioned above presaged a geographic shift in the center of social organizations, the move to Webster Avenue. But the largest concentration of houses still occurred near the center of town on West Wheelock Street. Observers expected this to become a fraternity row, for in 1907-08 Psi Upsilon, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Phi Gamma Delta (Fig. 28), and Theta Delta Chi joined C&G on the street.

	25. 1835 Stephen Brown House on School St. as occupied by Phi Psi/Panarchy c.1902 (postcard).
	26. 1842 Dewey House at 27 North Main St. as occupied by Sigma Nu in 1911 (postcard).
	27. 1795 Brown/Unity House as occupied by Chi Phi in 1903 (postcard).
	28. The c.1840 Brewster House on the eastern corner of West Wheelock and School Streets as occupied by Phi Gamma Delta in 1907 (postcard). The fraternity added the columns.

    The College opened Webster Avenue in 1896. This decision is difficult to characterize as a ploy to centralize the fraternities, and the reconfiguration of Webster Avenue as Fraternity Row was not sudden. Webster Avenue was instead a College real estate venture designed to open up the former Morse farmland to house new professors (the current Tri-Delt was built as faculty duplex) (Fig. 29). The houses also accommodated those whom the new Butterfield Museum and its Quadrangle, now Baker Lawn, displaced from around the Green. The Webster Cottage that stood on the corner where Rockefeller now stands presumably helped suggest the street's name (Fig. 30). The College had the architects Dwight & Chandler of Boston design four houses for professors, and it sold three lots at the beginning of the street to fraternities. The College only owned the north side of the street, and the south side would remain undeveloped as part of the Hitchcock Estate until 1912. And even within the limited geography of the north side, the third of the three fraternies did not build a house until 1915. The Avenue would stay that way for a decade, and the houses that give the street its current character did not begin to go up until the mid-1920s.

	29. 1898-99 Ridge House as occupied by Delta Delta Delta c.1994-95 (author).
	30. Map of site of Webster Ave. in 1894 (author, after Sanborn map). [1915 Map | 1937 Map]

VI. Greek-Letter Societies 1920-1940 | The brick second generation
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