The Village

The station in Lewiston represented Dartmouth's connection to the world--in an era before quality highways, the railroad was the best way to travel in and out of Hanover. Known officially as the Hanover-Norwich Station, the 1884 building was the first impression of Dartmouth for thousands of arriving freshmen over the decades. The coach drive across the bridge and up the hill to the Inn was performed by legendary characters; departing campus for the station as well could be a spectacle. Football teams leaving for a big game piled onto a coach at the Green while a parade of supporters followed them down West Wheelock Street, which was known as "Depot Hill." The importance of the depot to the school is particularly apparent in a 1920 master plan for Dartmouth, which proposes to extend the campus across the river to Vermont in its depiction of a "Station Square" in Lewiston. A proposed new Ledyard Bridge was to take the existing station as a focal point and lend an air of formality to the de-facto gateway to Dartmouth. The plan was not built.

Goods also came into the region through Lewiston, coal in particular. Dartmouth heated its buildings from a central steam plant starting in 1898 and found bituminous coal essential. The school's Heating Plant had a coal pocket originally holding 800 tons, and in its first year the plant consumed 1,375 tons of coal. By 1906 the campus and the plant had expanded enough to raise annual coal consumption to 3,200 tons per year, burning up 18 tons per day in the depths of winter.⁶ All of this coal had to come to Hanover via Lewiston: The gondolas of the Boston & Maine, perched on a coal trestle north of the station, would dump their cargo into storage bins below, from which one of the town's several coal dealers would haul it load by load over the bridge and up the hill into Hanover.

Lewiston thrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The town had a creamery, Thompson's Coal Yard among others, Ames' Sawmill, Huggett's Blacksmith Shop, and Kibling's General Store, which contained the local post office beginning in 1898. During Prohibition in the 1920s, a speakeasy called Buckets of Blood set up operations a half-mile north of the station. Nearby was a brothel, forbidden to locate in the center of Lewiston, that was popular with Dartmouth students.⁷ The station supported a variety of uses: Dairy farms shipped their products out on milk trains, and millworkers commuted by rail to White River Junction downriver.

Unlike those grand cities that straddle two sides of a divide such as Edinburgh, Prague, or Kansas City, Lewiston did not grow together with Hanover. Lewiston's economic base began to fade in the 1920s: the mills began closing. Oil replaced coal as Dartmouth's fuel in the late 1920s,⁸ and all the mills were gone by 1930. The main depot for Hanover shifted to White River Junction, Vermont. Industry was regionalizing and leaving Lewiston behind, and the town's prosperity would not recover. Some of the town's problems related to its location--as valuable as the transport junction was, it was also situated between a river and a ridge that left little room for expansion. The village became a bedroom community for Hanover and Norwich after World War II, as landlords transformed existing houses into apartments.

The new houses that lined MacKenna Street on the hill behind the station after the war could not reverse Lewiston's decline. When the Wilder Dam was completed downstream in 1950, the rising Connecticut River took away low-lying farmland. The post office closed in 1954, and the rail station in 1960. By then the business district had dwindled to three warehouses, a sporting goods store in the station, the Twin State Shoe Shop, and the Raycraft General Store.⁹

The village's death blow came quickly in 1967. The new Interstate 91 ran just behind MacKenna Hill above the town, and the highway's planners built an onramp that would connect the highway with Route 10A, the road that runs through Lewiston and crosses the Ledyard Bridge. The new onramp traffic meant that Route 10A needed widening, and Charlie Armstrong recalled the event more than a decade later in a newspaper article: "It was a sad morning. I took my wife to work in Hanover in the morning. When I came back that evening they had bulldozed all the houses and in 10 or 15 minutes set them afire."¹⁰ Workers demolished a total of nine buildings in widening Route 10A.¹¹

6. Dartmouth College Trustees' Records, Committee on Buildings and Improvements [printed sheet] (27 May 1899), Dartmouth College Archives; Dartmouth Bi-Monthly 1, No. 3 (February 1906), 148; The Dartmouth 29 (21 January 1908).

7. Story cites Abby Metcalf, Norwich Historical Society, interviewed by David Story (4 March 1983).

8. Richardson 1932, 776

9. Ralph Nading Hill, College on the Hill (Hanover: Dartmouth College,1964), 286; Waterman, 28; Story cites Some Pages of Norwich History: A Bicentennial Publication (Norwich, Vt.: 1961), 12.

10. Perin.

11. Story.

©2000 Scott Meacham