"Dartmouth spirit," as Tucker's administration promoted it, was a sense of loyalty and affection that students and alumni felt for their institution. This loyalty had its basis in a sentimental connection to the past, a connection that the administration created self-consciously. Spirit depended on both old and newly-minted traditions.

In the autobiography he published ten years after retiring from the presidency, Tucker explained the importance of spirit during periods of growth. "Creation of high college sentiment," wrote Tucker, "was essential to the full institutional development of the College. 'The mind of the college' can be lifted at such times above the ordinary causes of enthusiasm and set upon the growths and advancements of the college itself."⁸⁰ Though spirit could become anti-educational and lead to provincialism, President Tucker did not let this danger dim his enthusiasm for its power. He quoted Woodrow Wilson's 1909 inaugural address at Princeton: "The great power of the world--namely, its emotional power--is better expressed in a college gathering than in any other gathering." The love of men for their school, said Wilson, "delights to give as a token of its affection for its alma mater some of those eternal, intangible gifts which are expressed only in the spirits of men."⁸¹

Spirit also gave practical gifts as well as intangible ones. It was during Tucker's administration, particularly after Dartmouth Hall burned in 1904, that gifts from alumni began to become a significant source of funding for the College. Tucker spoke of a "spirit of practical loyalty" that the fire had caused among alumni.⁸² Tucker himself had been one of the original Alumni Trustees since 1878, representing the new power that alumni across the country held in governing their colleges.⁸³

College spirit, like democracy, faced subtle threats. An institution's memory of the past might just slip away without anyone missing it, depriving spirit of its foundation. Spirit, because it relied on memory, inevitably also depended on the physical, the place itself. At Dartmouth, that place not only fell under the shadow of the new university, but had largely disappeared before Tucker even arrived.

President Tucker felt the need to excuse the dearth of buildings dating to the time of the founder Eleazar Wheelock. Tucker spoke to the Hanover meeting of the New Hampshire Historical Society, saying

the early history of the College is not much in evidence. It is a part of the unconsciousness of great men that they go about their work with a disregard for posterity. Eleazar Wheelock saw none of the present buildings. The only thing surviving him is his home, which passed out of College ownership. Nothing except the sites can now be recovered.⁸⁴

For the college to simply recover the sites of its old buildings had its limits. The two original buildings of the College, which Wheelock began in 1770, were temporary wooden structures that lasted little more than two decades (Fig. 34). The buildings' absence forced the College to mark out their sites on the Green for the Society meeting. Even the Old Pine, which students had come to revere as a tie to antiquity much as they revered Dartmouth Hall, succumbed to age and the weather in 1895. The adjacent Bartlett Tower (1885-1895) could only do so much acting as a surrogate for the Old Pine. To "keep vital the host of traditions which cluster about the Old Pine" and prevent even its stump from disappearing, the College treated the fragment with bi-chlorid of mercury in 1912. President Tucker, then retired, wrote the text of the plaque that the College placed on the concrete coping around the stump.⁸⁵

The College administration, reacting in part to this lack of a past, undertook a broad movement to provide a basis for a college spirit that did not depend on artifacts. President Tucker termed this effort "the recovery of the history of the college as its general working capital."⁸⁶ Societies in a state of change often use the past for new purposes, creating new rituals in order to inculcate values, as Hobsbawm has pointed out.⁸⁷ Tucker held a self-conscious, even artificial attitude to tradition as he went about creating new ones.⁸⁸ In language that he sprinkled with terms from the world of finance, Tucker pushed the College to reconstitute its past in order to make it useful for present purposes, literally to capitalize on it.

The College recovered its past in a number of forms. "College sentiment has its literature. College literature is not a matter of subject, but of atmosphere," wrote Tucker in an introduction to an 1895 book of undergraduate verse mostly about the College.⁸⁹ Also falling into the category of sentimental literature was a 1902 book about College traditions that contained "facts which every Dartmouth man should know and the knowledge of which cannot but increase his love and admiration for the college."⁹⁰ Tucker's administration also mined the past for powerful personalities to whom the modern College could forge a connection, such as the benefactor Lord Dartmouth, whose descendant still lived in England. Students invoked the Lord in song and poem and dedicated a volume of the annual Aegis to him.⁹¹ To bring the actual flesh-and-blood Lord Dartmouth into contact with the College, administrators arranged for William Heneage Legge, PC to lay the cornerstone of the new Dartmouth Hall in 1904.⁹² The Boston Evening Transcript commented on how strange this relationship was. The current Lord, a conservative and an Anglican, was visiting a school "that has bred innumerable Free Churchmen and Democrats."⁹³

Wheelock and Webster also played important parts. According to Tucker, the current growth of the College was a modern expression of the pioneering spirit of the founder Eleazar Wheelock.⁹⁴ Tucker even created a term, "the Wheelock Succession," to refer to the chain of presidents. Tucker even invented a "Succession ceremony" when he inaugurated President Nichols after him.⁹⁵ During Tucker's tenure the College also recarved the lettering on Wheelock's tombstone, placed his family arms on the new library bookplates and changed the name of the College hotel from "The Wheelock" to "The Hanover Inn" out of deference for the man.⁹⁶ Daniel Webster was even more an institutional asset, and the 1901 centennial of his graduation was a key opportunity for the College to build sentiment as well as raise funds.⁹⁷ For the Centennial version of the annual Dartmouth Night the alumni wore Webster uniforms of a "blue coat, buff waistcoat, stock, dicky and tall hat."⁹⁸ On parade floats a few actual objects materialized to strengthen the bond with Webster: his plow, table, chair, stove and carriage. A pair of elm trees standing before a house on the parade route wore the inscription "we were here with Dan."⁹⁹

President Tucker's chief invention was the annual Dartmouth Night, which he first held September 17, 1895. "To perpetuate the Dartmouth spirit and to capitalize the history of the College" was the purpose Tucker ascribed to the evening.¹⁰⁰ The occasion predicted much of the format of the typical Old Home Week, another New Hampshire invention that Governor Rollins would first proclaim in 1899.¹⁰¹ The students assembled in the Old Chapel in the center of Dartmouth Hall to admire the portraits of illustrious precursors and hear addresses from alumni "who illustrate the success and ability of Dartmouth graduates." The speeches at this new ritual are illustrative: Ex-President Bartlett, now a popular professor, spoke on the history of the building and the need to preserve it, while Congressman Samuel W. McCall, 1874 spoke on the size of the College and the effectiveness of a medium-sized school. The College newspaper conveys how thoroughly it saw the event as a tradition despite its novelty by reporting "the custom of 'Dartmouth Night' was successfully inaugurated, and will be a most pleasing feature of college life."¹⁰²

In the service of Tucker's smooth transition to the university, the physical equivalent of the new traditions was the campus that Charles Rich designed. Buildings have the advantage of being more permanent than rituals, whose fragile ephemerality The Dartmouth highlighted when it informed students that the seventeenth Dartmouth Night "demands your attendance."¹⁰³ And since the expanding school had to build new buildings in some form, for Rich to imbue them with history made sense. The architect could help mitigate the intrusion of the university that the buildings represented. Therefore Rich and his patrons devoted much of their effort to making the new buildings bolster collegiate values, particularly college spirit. This project becomes clear in the styles Charles Rich used for his buildings, the way he incorporated found objects into their fabrics, and the way he sited them on the campus.

Top | Style | Found Objects | Siting

Rich faced the problem of choosing an idiom in which to build. The relative lack of recent buildings at the College gave Rich something of a clean slate on which to begin. Medieval styles could have furnished a solution, and the English roots of the College might have led the architect to use an English collegiate Gothic as was Princeton. Rich himself had done Gothic work, including a rough-hewn church in Short Hills, N.J. (1884) and the Washington Heights Baptist Church, which his firm designed in Harlem in 1897.¹⁰⁴

Rich might also have looked to the recent past, in which the College had undertaken a new stylistic venture by building Wilson Hall, Rollins Chapel, Bartlett Hall and The Wheelock. All four buildings are freer in their sources and more wildly romantic than any precursors in Hanover. Two different Boston architects designed the chapel and library, and the College laid the cornerstones for both buildings on the same day in 1884. Samuel J.F. Thayer used a vocabulary of red brick and terra-cotta ornament in Wilson hall (Fig. 9), while John Lyman Faxon formed the cyclopean masonry of Rollins from pink Lebanon granite.¹⁰⁵ Both buildings feature the large round arches and asymmetrical composition that fellow Bostonian H.H. Richardson had helped make popular. Bartlett Hall (1890-1), the Y.M.C.A., follows a vein similar to the library and also bears stepped gables in the Dutch manner. Lambert Packard of St. Johnsbury, Vermont designed the building, as well as The Wheelock (1887).¹⁰⁶ Though Charles Rich had designed buildings very similar to these, he did not to build anything of the sort at Dartmouth.

Instead Charles Rich chose to look back to Colonial times, a method he had employed before. In Brooklyn, Rich had been able to create a connection to place despite the dearth of surviving colonial architecture. In the Astral Apartments Rich used a stepped gable to speak to New York's Dutch heritage (Fig. 29). The Mount Morris Bank in Manhattan of 1883-4 and 1889-90 is another example (Fig. 35).¹⁰⁷ In New York such gables had once existed. By contrast, similarly suitable models had never existed in Hanover. As Tucker lamented, Eleazar Wheelock had built only a clapboard home along with a few wooden buildings. Frost-heaves and students had eradicated the original buildings by 1790. In resurrecting the founder architecturally as Tucker was doing in speech and ritual, Rich had to imagine what Wheelock would have built, had he had the resources.

Wheelock did in fact intend to build a particular sort of building. He began digging a foundation, the one that would later underpin Dartmouth Hall, which he hoped would support a masonry building "in the most plain, decent and cheapest Manner, after the dorick Order."¹⁰⁸ In a way, the Doric corner pilasters and other Greek Revival details of Ammi Burnham Young's Reed Hall (1839-40) bow to Wheelock's wish, however unwittingly (Fig. 36). But Rich chose to look beyond the specific past of the College for sources, following models that were not only missing in his time but had never existed in Hanover. This choice was certainly no more radical than Princeton's decision to follow the Gothic. The College essentially created a past for itself where none existed. Now the history on which spirit depended would have a firm foundation, if an invented one. The critic Montgomery Schuyler wrote:

That "Colonial" reproduction and modification of the British Georgian which prevailed at the time when Dartmouth was chartered, in places where building was more durable and more costly than the upper Connecticut Valley, was pretty imperatively indicated as the style of Dartmouth.¹¹⁰

When Tucker reported "that the controlling type should be that of the Colonial college, with such modifications as the necessary uses of any buildings might require" he did not mean this Colonial college in particular.¹¹¹ Accordingly, a number of existing buildings became more "Colonial" at the turn of the century, even buildings that were genuinely old. Rich gave the 1810 Crosby Hall "Colonial yellow" paint and a set of white columns in 1896 (Fig. 37).¹¹² The Inn became more Colonial with a white-columned porch and paneled interior, as well as new Dutch gables, in 1902. In 1899 the College repainted the Old Row "in strict accord with 'early Noranglian architecture'" as Professor Richardson put it.¹¹³ The paper reported that:

The brick buildings have received a coat of real Dutch yellow, which was the color originally intended for them by their architects. They give the town a true colonial appearance, and make Hanover a typical old New England town.¹¹⁴

Rich created the new buildings by the same process of artificial antiquity. Most of Rich's designs are conventional "Colonial" buildings of red brick and white trim, appealing to generic images of Early America. Rich based the buildings of Administration Row on more strictly Classical forms; the remaining buildings are exceptions to those two groups and include the heating plant, the gymnasium and the science laboratory, buildings for which few prototypes existed. Dartmouth Hall is a special case since it follows an actual Dartmouth precedent. We can look at each of the stylistic groups in detail to see how Rich appealed to history to provide a connection to Dartmouth's past.

Most of Rich's "Colonial" buildings on the campus are dormitories. Generally of three stories and often carrying gambrel roofs with dormers, the dormitories feature white trim and very little in the way of ornamental stonework. Wheeler Hall of 1904-5 is a good example of the type (Fig. 38). The flat walls and end chimneys of Wheeler's short arms recall such high-style houses of Colonial America as the Foster-Hutchinson House of c. 1688 in Boston (Fig. 39). The end walls of that building were an English feature that originated in closely-spaced urban dwellings but soon became an American commonplace, as the McPhedris-Warner House in Portsmouth, N.H. of 1718-23 shows (Fig. 40). By calling up images of such buildings, Wheeler Hall places itself in the tradition of the grand eighteenth-century New England urban residence, if on a larger scale. Wheeler's similarity to Colonial dormitories elsewhere, or even the YWCA of Lancaster, Pennsylvania (Fig.41), confirms its residential appeal.¹¹⁵

The 1899-1900 Fayerweather Hall (Figs. 21, 22) took its cue from Dartmouth Hall. Like the older building behind which it stood, Fayerweather has three stories, a hipped roof and a central Palladian pavilion. Rich gave the building three entrances like Dartmouth Hall, which sets the dormitory apart from the others on campus. Both buildings thus fit into the building tradition that appeared at other Colonial colleges, for example in University Hall at Brown (Fig. 42). Fayerweather forgoes the white color of Dartmouth Hall for a particularly red shade of brick that Rich seems not to have used in other major buildings at the College. The flattened arches on each of Fayerweather's three floors are similar to those of Randall Hall at the New Hampton School in Fairfax, Vermont (1829-33; rebuilt 1853)¹¹⁶ Ammi Young had also proposed arches stretching the full height of the facades of Wentworth and Thornton Halls, though what the College actually built was simpler.

Other dormitories continue the trend of Wheeler. Massachusetts Hall of 1907-8 (Fig. 25) bears similarities to Colonial academic precedents, including Massachusetts Hall at Harvard of 1718-20 (Fig. 43) and Connecticut Hall at Yale of 1750-2, a prototype for the gambrel roof at Dartmouth (Fig. 44). Other buildings of Rich's era rework the Colonial the past the way Dartmouth's Massachusetts Hall does, including the Massachusetts Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Fig. 45). Drawings of Rich's unbuilt 1911 dormitory called "Hillside" do not survive, but the building apparently had a "Georgian central feature" at one point, probably a central projection like that of Fayerweather.¹¹⁷ The end walls of the 1907-8 New Hampshire Hall (Fig. 10) have carved granite scrolls recalling the lion and unicorn of the Second Town House in Boston (1712-13), a building with domestic meanings despite its governmental function (Fig. 46).¹¹⁸ Rich was by no means a pioneer in borrowing motifs from Colonial buildings, indeed he was but one part in a national movement. Nor was Rich the first to imitate Colonial work in Hanover: Stanford White had designed the new chancel of the Church of Christ in 1889.¹¹⁹

Rich's first and last dormitories represent transitional periods. The 1897-8 Richardson Hall (Fig. 47) has a rusticated granite ground level and a domed portico, both elements that no other Dartmouth dormitory would employ. The building also has a number of Colonial elements, such as the triangular end gables of white-painted wood, as well as the usual limestone trim and prominent dormers above. The 1912-13 Hitchcock Hall (Fig. 19) has little such detail, offering instead a large expanse of brick that makes the building more institutional in character than the other dormitories. The building's spare limestone trim also links it to the nearby Administration Row. Hitchcock is Rich's only full four-story dormitory, and it is the last dormitory he designed at Dartmouth.

A second group of Rich's buildings comprises the imposing Classical structures of Administration Row. This group expresses the Orders more strongly than most buildings Rich designed for the College: College Hall (1901) (Fig. 31), Tuck Hall (1902-4) (Fig. 14), Parkhurst Hall (1910-11) (Fig. 6) and Robinson Hall (1913-14) (Fig. 30). Though far simpler than many flamboyant buildings Rich designed elsewhere, the Classical details of stern Indiana limestone serve to mark Administration Row as the public face of the College. The buildings' prominent stone cornices and dentils also set them off from the nearby dormitories. Some common elements exist, however: like most buildings at the College, the Classical buildings use random black headers and prominent mortar joints in the fashion of "Harvard brick."¹²⁰ Charles McKim had developed the brickwork technique around 1888 to blend his new gates with the eighteenth-Century buildings of Harvard Yard, and the pattern gave Dartmouth's new buildings a look of age.¹²¹

College Hall (Fig. 31), as the first member of Administration Row, stands out from its neighbors. Due to a lack of funds, Rich substituted wood for some of the building's stone trim, including the corner quoins and cornice. The dining hall at the rear of the building also forgoes masonry in favor of a clapboard exterior. The building originally hid its roof behind a balustrade, while nearby buildings do not. The most important feature of College Hall is its two-story semicircular ionic portico; otherwise the building is an unassuming box. The porch gives the building the appearance of a contemporary country club, which is not an inappropriate message for the building to send.

Tuck Hall is a three-story building whose blank attic level originally housed the commercial museum of the business school (Fig. 14).¹²² Pilasters delineate the projecting central pavilion and support the pediment, again a triangle interrupted by steps at the center and ends. A central aedicule with a triangular pediment frames a grilled window on the second floor; a carved pediment surmounts the door opening below. Early designs for Tuck depict a much wider building that has more in common with typical university buildings than houses (Fig. 48).¹²³

Administration Row does not lack an element of domesticity despite the institutional Classicism of its buildings. The appearance of the mansions that formerly ruled this side of the Green make such an element appropriate (Fig. 49). The lack of a hipped roof, the presence of dormers and the small size of the Parkhurst Administration Building (Fig. 6) make is the most house-like of the row, which is fitting since the building is a sentimental family monument to a son who had died before graduating.¹²⁴ The College officers who worked in the building were also familiar with domestic surroundings, since their headquarters had previously been the Lord House north of the Green. Rich even had to enlarge his designs for Parkhurst somewhat as he was sketching the building to make it fit with its larger neighbors.¹²⁵

Mr. Robinson preferred that his building (Fig. 30) look more like Tuck Hall than College Hall.¹²⁶ Rich carried out this wish, using the limestone of Tuck rather than the wooden trim of College. Robinson also differs in a number of ways from its neighbors, most notably in the arch that the cornice executes as it runs across the facade. Below the arch is a Palladian window and a pair of flanking stone shields. Robinson has more decorative stonework than most buildings Rich designed at Dartmouth, including the lions' head reliefs on panels inside the vestibule.¹²⁷

Rich's Classical buildings reflect his eclectic interpretation of the Italian Renaissance. The architect had traveled extensively in Europe, often recounting his tours in the architectural press. Rich specified that the lamps on Parkhurst Hall be copies of those on a building he had visited in Florence, the 1536 Palazzo Strozzi.¹²⁸ But nothing about Rich's buildings made them slavish copies. The capitals on the two outer brick pilasters of Parkhurst are simple abstractions, revealing an architect who was a Classicist without adhering strictly to past prototypes. For the capitals on Tuck's four pilasters, Rich modified the Ionic order and added a mutule with a trio of guttae below each.

Rich had designed limestone-trimmed Classical buildings before, of which the most important example is the 1890-91 Berkeley Preparatory School on West 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan (Fig. 50).¹²⁹ The School prepared boys for scientific colleges, with military drill as part of the curriculum. The School's rusticated base and four central Ionic columns stand in sharp contrast to the rather Romanesque Mt. Morris Bank that Lamb & Rich's completed just a year earlier and make the Classical school a new departure for the firm.

Though Administration Row follows the Berkeley's Classicism, it is with a Georgian red brick rather than the Renaissance yellow. Following the lead of McKim, Mead and White's 1890-1 Browne and Merideth Apartment Building in Boston (Fig. 51), Rich would manipulate Indiana limestone and red brick into something of a staple vocabulary.¹³⁰ Rich executed an early example of a studio apartment, the Bryant Park Studio of 1900-01, in his signature materials.¹³¹ The artist Abraham Archibald Anderson commissioned the building; he was the husband of Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, who asked Rich to design the Milbank Public Baths on 38th Street in Manhattan in 1902 (Fig. 52).¹³² While the studio is somewhat more ornate than the Dartmouth buildings, the public bath is more familiar in its simplicity. Later buildings in this red-brick mode include the 1903-4 Scott Laboratory at Wesleyan University, which could be a larger member of Administration Row (Fig. 53); the Broadway theater that producer William A. Brady built 1911 called the Playhouse (Fig. 54); and Memorial Hall at the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey of 1924.¹³³

Charles Rich spread a number of uniform elements amongst his Dartmouth buildings, including quoined corners, Classical detailing and a relatively small amount of stonework. Within this red-brick harmony, however, a number of buildings that are neither Colonial nor Classical stand out. The College's heating plant, gymnasium and science laboratory all represent new functional types with few predecessors. These three buildings remain historicist, but their modern functions seem to give them the freedom to reach less assertively into a specific past as the other buildings had to. The Heating Plant of 1898 (Fig. 5) stands on the swampy site of the Hanover Gas Works. The row of round arches on the building's ground level have a traditional Rich robustness and signal the building's industrial status. The Heating Plant is a background building and Rich later placed a dormitory in front of it. The Alumni Gymnasium, on the other hand, is far too large for Rich to hide (Fig. 4). Indeed the Gym was an object of pride among the alumni, who had hired Rich themselves for this non-College project with the administration's blessing. The Gymnasium owes as much to armory design as it does to Colonial precedent, and like the Heating Plant, the front of the Gym bears the unusual "squared-off" triangular pediment that only the new business school shares at Dartmouth. The Gymnasium's gable ends feature decorative tiles; in the rear the architect became even freer and installed the Dutch gable familiar from his work in Brooklyn of the 1880s. The swimming pool Rich added to the rear of the Gym in 1919-20 also picked up this gable form.

The anomalous appearance of the Wilder Physical Laboratory reflects not only its status as an early building in Rich's project but also its unique purpose (Fig. 12). The College built the laboratory in 1897-9 to meet the demand for modern scientific facilities and hired a rising young physicist, Ernest Fox Nichols, to direct it. Nichols helped plan the interior of the building with Professor Charles Emerson, and undertook pioneering experiments that measured the pressure of light in Wilder's laboratories.¹³⁴ Wilder was the only building The Physical Review favored with an article in 1901, one that Nichols wrote. Nichols later returned to Dartmouth to succeed Tucker in the presidency.

Wilder Hall does not appeal to domestic ideals as its neighboring dormitories do; instead it has a flat roof on which scientists could conduct meteorological observations.¹³⁵ The building stands three stories above a high basement and has two side wings that barely project from the facade. An arched granite entry with exaggerated voussoirs stands in the center. This idiom mirrors an earlier Rich project, the 1896-8 main building at Barnard College (Fig. 55) adjacent Columbia University . Parts of the building house scientific laboratories, including one floor of labs in Milbank Hall, the center section (1896), and all of Fiske Hall (1897-98), the building's western or left wing.¹³⁶ Montgomery Schuyler termed this building "Jacobean" and might well have given Wilder the same name.¹³⁷

Rich's buildings, then, make little reference to the actual past of the College even though they might refer to the generalized Colonial past. One exception exists, Rich's replacement for Dartmouth Hall of 1904-6. The new building does not merely refer the Colonial college "type" as Tucker called it, or embellish the form of Dartmouth Hall as Fayerweather Hall did. Rich's new Dartmouth Hall is a near-facsimile of the original of 1784-91 (Fig. 3). The old wooden building caught fire and burned to the ground on February 18, 1904.¹³⁸ The Trustees met in Boston two days later and the minutes of their meeting quoted President Tucker as saying, "Dartmouth Hall is now a memory, but the spirit which inspired it remains untouched, and will rise to face the future years."¹³⁹ The call immediately went up for the College to rebuild the building in its original form. The iconic significance of the old edifice made it imperative that Rich replicate the it. But as Tucker pointed out at the dedication ceremony, the givers of the building had failed to entirely reproduce it:

You could not restore the ancient traditions: you cold not replace the marks left by the generations from their work and their play; you could not reproduce the very walls which held the spirits of the past. You have followed the order of nature which teaches us that the only way to recover lost values is to re-create them. This hall in which we stand is a re-creation, faithful wherever it was possible to the details of the old hall, but built in the freedom of the spirit rather than in bondage to the letter. You have given us a building adapted in every part to the uses of a modern college. In its outward appearance, as in the spirit which pervades it, it stands for the Dartmouth of a hundred years ago; in its adaptations, and appointments, and equipment, it stands for the Dartmouth of today. Whatever may be its semblance, no more modern building faces the College green than this re-creation of the old Dartmouth Hall.¹⁴⁰

The new Dartmouth Hall is thus not a mere simulacrum. The subtle contradictions between the desires for tradition and modernity that the building betrays make Dartmouth Hall one of the most curious buildings on the campus. The building follows a pattern that McKim, Mead & White set in the Rotunda at the University of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson had designed the building; all but the brick shell burned in 1895. When Stanford White created the Rotunda interior to his own designs, he intended his work to respect Jefferson's design and be modern and practical at the same time.¹⁴¹ 

Rich stipulated that many features of his modern Dartmouth Hall should be carefully Colonial, according to contemporary newspaper accounts. The overall form of the building followed the traditional college type that builders had used well into the nieteenth century; in this way the building was a survival as much as a revival. On the interior the hardware included "old-fashioned" door handles of brass and "old-fashioned" locks, while "old-style" windows appeared throughout the building. The desks in the second floor recitation halls were single birch planks (Fig. 56). The central auditorium reflected the Old Chapel of the same position in the earlier building, and it contained bench seats, again because they were "old-fashioned."¹⁴² The new building mimicked the color of the old one, the new Dartmouth Hall was even more emphatically white than its predecessor. Photographs of the new building in its red-brick nativity show that its final color was not inevitable (Fig. 57). Rich and the building committee were certain from the beginning that the building needed to be white, however, and even considered using white marble or modern white-glazed bricks from the Perth Amboy Co. to achieve the proper tint.

Dartmouth hall also accommodated modern needs despite its mimicry of an historic building. The fire was in some ways a boon to the administration, in that it finally allowed the College to be rid of an awkward, unsafe and outdated building. Rich's 1893 master plan had proposed as much; now, rather than having to demolish the old building over the objections of alumni, the College could have a new Dartmouth Hall and raise alumni spirit at the same time. The new and the old were interwoven. Not only would the new building display a traditional clock on its front, but lamps would light the face at night, and a second Howard clock would keep time on the rear facade of the hall.¹⁴³  The new hall was brick rather than wood; it was fully modern and fireproof inside; and the new building was slightly larger and of better proportion than the old. Though the exteriors of the two buildings are remarkably similar, some detected a difference. The old building "was thoroughly representative of the puritanical plainness of its time" while the new "is as truly characteristic of the modern style of almost a century and a half later" wrote The Dartmouth.¹⁴⁴ The most important change in the new hall was programmatic, as Rich gave the building only offices and recitation halls, thereby banishing the mix of dormitory and chapel functions to other buildings.¹⁴⁵ In some ways Dartmouth Hall stands as a metaphor for the whole project of placing the university into the college by invoking collegiate values: here was a building that mimicked the past, and yet everything that went on inside was different from what had gone on before.

The buildings Charles Rich did not design for Dartmouth are almost as important as those he did. Most of the New York work of Lamb & Rich (1881-1899) differed considerably from Dartmouth's sober and balanced buildings. Scholars today know Rich mainly for his country houses, which were rambling, picturesque affairs. Vincent Scully wrote in his seminal book on the Shingle Style that "if Lamb and Rich were often blatant they were always free, and the wildest energies of their time were expressed in their work."¹⁴⁶ The 1882 house Rich designed for the millionaire stockbroker William I. Russell in the new suburb of Short Hills, New Jersey, is a good example (Fig. 58).¹⁴⁷ Russell called his house "Redstone," and Rich filled the house with a mix of materials and textures.¹⁴⁸ All of the brass heating registers were different; Japanese leather appeared in the dining room; the exterior of the building used stone, brick, timber and shingles jutting in a number of different directions. Lamb & Rich's city buildings were often similarly free: Schuyler wrote that meat-packer H.O. Armour's Fifth Avenue residence (1880) (Fig. 59) called for "the intervention of an architectural police" as a case of "disorderly conduct done in brick and brown stone."¹⁴⁹ At Dartmouth Rich followed little of this freedom of composition, a difference that reflects a change in his own taste as well as the rising national interest in the American Colonial.

As much as Rich's two bodies of work differ, the picturesque and the Classical share a certain attitude. In whatever he designed, Rich borrowed freely from a catalog of romantic motifs in order to conjure up associations for his clients. As he had done for a host of stockbrokers and manufacturers on Long Island, Rich in effect invented an ancestral home for the College.

At Dartmouth, Rich used the Colonial where elsewhere he would have appealed to some world of Elizabethan domesticity. In his houses, Rich strove to achieve a comfortable sense of home, spelling out "Good Cheer" in tiles above a dining room fireplace for example. A huge fireplace in the living hall was perhaps the most important element of many of Rich's houses, for it created a manor a laird could be proud of ruling. The fireplace in Rich's own summer home held "logs the size of a man," while the stone arch fireplace he installed in "Redstone" was five feet wide (Fig. 60).¹⁵⁰ At Dartmouth, Rich invoked not to the cozy domestic but the stately Colonial, though it was just as much an invocation. Instead of fireplaces, Rich might appeal to ideas of Colonial gentility by placing a Palladian window in the Faculty Room of Parkhurst, or the front of Robinson. Where Rich cozily spelled out "Sunset Cottage" in sea pebbles on wall of the 1881 home he designed for his father, the architect modeled Massachusetts Hall on the grand mansion of Colonial history. The Dartmouth buildings, by referring to the Colonial past and the motifs that many associated with it, created urbane and prosperous eighteenth-century roots for the College.

Top | Style | Found Objects | Siting

One method Rich employed to imbue his buildings with a sense of history deserves attention. Rich incorporated what we might call "found objects" into the very fabric of the new buildings he designed. Buildings could rescue a piece of the history whose passing Tucker noted, preserving the memory of the past in a form that was indeed physical and authentic, if fragmentary. The various objects that Rich took on range in scale from single stones to whole buildings, and he placed them exactly as he had done in his earlier work.

Dartmouth Hall again provides an example. The College revered the fabric of the building, a feeling that developed long before the fire. Many students reacted against the College's 1893 plan to move or demolish the building. If the building had to go, some proposed, the College should preserve the building's upper hallway or "Bedbug Alley" as "a vivid reminder of the old days."¹⁵¹ Thus when the building burned, the College reacted as one might expect by scavenging among the debris for any useful remnants. The Boston alumni association resolved that a new hall must use old fragments: "sentiment will be preserved as much as possible by utilizing foundation stones, windows, and other things which have been saved from the fire."¹⁵² Rich managed to follow this directive. Three of the stone steps at the side entrances of the new building come from the old, artifacts that Melvin Adams described as "historic steps footworn by many generations."¹⁵³ The bronze in the cornerstone plaque comes from the bells that fell into the building's basement during the fire. The two front windows nearest the center of the new building came from the old hall "while it was burning;" the College placed them "to preserve some of the associations of old Dartmouth." Inside the central room of the building stands a speaker's desk that someone made from an oak corner post of the old building.¹⁵⁴ The lock in the central door came from the original hall, and the new building uses most of the foundations of the original.

For a school to incorporate fragments of old buildings into its new ones was not unusual. The 1817 cornerstone of Allegheny College contained chips of stone from Plymouth Rock, Dido's Temple and the Tomb of Virgil.¹⁵⁵ When Stokes and Howells designed the Colonial administration building at Yale, Woodbridge Hall of 1901, they incorporated interior elements from old houses of New Haven, New York and Greenwich Village. The fireplaces and other pieces from dated from Colonial times as well as the mid-19th century.¹⁵⁶

Rich also imbued his buildings with special meaning by installing elements of old buildings in them. In his Long Island summer house, Rich was able to support a second-floor gallery on a pair of antique columns he bought at a lumberyard (Fig. 61). In the office of Lamb & Rich at 265 Broadway, a mantelpiece of "Old Colonial Work" adorned the fireplace. The architects had found in a junk shop in the city.¹⁵⁷

The beams Rich exposed under the roof of Wentworth Hall him allowed him to create another sort of found object when he remodeled that building in 1912. Two years before this project Rich was the architect when Colgate University renovated its West Hall, an 1827 stone building, and the similar East Hall (1833-4).¹⁵⁸ The philosophy Rich held in these projects was probably similar to the one he applied at Dartmouth. The architect held a deep love of the picturesque detail, and in his youth had hunted for quaintness in Continental towns as if it were big game. In articles Rich wrote for the architectural press, he might sketch an interesting chimney-pot or medieval post (Fig. 62), referring frequently to beams "black with age."¹⁵⁹ In completely reorganizing Wentworth's original 1829 interior, Rich installed a new central staircase and moved the building's entry from the west end to the south side. Contractors shifted the carved granite door frame to the new entryway and placed a new gable on the north side of the roof. When Rich uncovered the old wooden trusses supporting the roof of the building, he devised a way to reveal them in the new stairwell and recitation rooms as a reminder of the age of the building. In consultation with President Nichols, Rich enhanced the genuinely old beams by adding iron plates to make the construction look "like the old-fashioned truss-work of our daddies."¹⁶⁰ A modern stained-glass skylight brings light into the stairwell and caps off the ensemble (Fig. 63).¹⁶¹

In one sense, elements of many Rich houses exist as found objects of the architect's own devising. The Colonial interior of the 1883 "Sunset Hall" in Lawrence, Long Island had imitation eighteenth-century furnishings and exposed-beam ceilings, as the architect directed. Rich even specified handwrought door hardware for the house. "Sunset Hall" took on the appearance of age at its very inception when the builders varied the shingle-staining as they went up the building. Rich had used this technique on "Sunset Cottage" of two years earlier as well.¹⁶²

Charles Rich had a particular affinity for the Parthenon frieze. Despite being products that a manufacturer might mass-produce, casts of the frieze had the power to evoke a sense of great age and noble values. The frieze appears in terra-cotta on the center of Rich's Berkeley School, probably from the plaster casts of the Elgin Marbles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.¹⁶³ Rich also installed a plaster cast of one part of the Parthenon frieze in the archaeology room on the top floor of Dartmouth Hall.¹⁶⁴ Rich had earlier donated a similar cast, possibly the same one, to stand over the fireplace in the lounge of the College Club. That fragment measured 9.5x3.5 feet.¹⁶⁵

Whole buildings also became found objects. Rich had a love of old buildings, and saw as "heathen" those people who "must needs tear down the relics of ancient days, in order to rear in their stead huge business blocks."¹⁶⁶ Thus when Rich added large dormitory wings to a pair of old houses, he brought the buildings' character to the forefront and gave the houses a new status (Figs. 37, 64). Students enjoyed the history that the places already possessed; unlike the new dormitories, the houses were not "bare of tradition and entirely devoid of the beautiful associations and memories which cluster around many of our old Hanover mansions."¹⁶⁷ Rich had performed a similar maneuver around 1889 at his pig-farm-turned-summer home in Bellport, Long Island, the "Old Rider Farm."¹⁶⁸ There he converted the barn into a studio (Fig. 61) after moving it to abut the old farmhouse. The building was a sort of homage to Rich's mentor, William Ralph Emerson. While Rich was in Emerson's employ, the elder architect had designed a studio called "the Hulk" for William Morris Hunt. The 1877 building in Magnolia, Massachusetts also incorporates an old barn for picturesque effect.¹⁶⁹

Top | Style | Found Objects | Siting

Dartmouth needed new facilities, and simply finding the room too place buildings in an organized way was one of Rich's most difficult problems. And yet Rich and his patrons were able to site their buildings with sensitivity, weaving the new into the old without greatly disrupting the traditional views of the small country college. Rich's original master plan and its descendants show the College desiring to avoid overwhelming what already existed. The three buildings of Fayerweather Row (Fig. 21), for instance, stand behind Dartmouth Row and mirror the older buildings in footprint, a strategy that became particularly apparent after Dartmouth Hall burned (Fig. 65). The old row hides the new to anyone standing on the Green, preserving the view from the Green as it had been.

Rich began looking for new building sites from the start, and within two months after the Trustees elected President Tucker on February 24, 1893, he had a master plan ready. The Trustees had not yet even ratified the new Committee on Buildings and Improvements, which would handle all the new building decisions.¹⁷⁰ The Trustees accepted Rich's plan that spring. Though a copy of the plan does not seem to survive, descriptions of the modern campus it depicted speak of efficiency, beauty and what now seems an almost hygienic separation of uses into distinct buildings. Not only did Rich propose to enlarge the campus, but he intended his additions to be orderly, parallel and straightforward, following the earliest patterns of the campus. The vistas that appeared along Elm Street to Wilder Hall, or from Crosby Hall to Richardson (Fig. 2), come from this plan and its descendants.¹⁷¹

In expanding along the edge of the College Park, Rich was able to place new buildings in a pattern that earlier builders had established. "The Terrace," as the administration called it, was a swathe of land stretching from Rollins Chapel to the 1811 Medical School (Fig. 13). The College graded the area and began to connect the Medical School to the College proper by a series of open quadrangles that followed the pattern of the College Yard in front of Dartmouth Row. Richardson and Wilder face down an open space that Wheeler divides into a pair of quadrangles. Rich also designed a 1903 addition to the Medical School that would have served the same spatial function as Wheeler, ending the next quadrangle to the north (Fig. 66).¹⁷² The College did not build the addition, opting instead for the 1907-8 Nathan Smith Laboratory (Fig. 67) of Edgar Hayes Hunter, who was Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. The laboratory was the only major building during Rich's tenure that he did not design, but it was not antithetical to his plan.¹⁷³ The College intending Nathan Smith to be the first of a pair of buildings that would flank the old Medical School.¹⁷⁴

The College was able to build most of its new buildings on empty land. On the west side of the Green, however, Rich faced an established row of early-nineteenth-century family houses standing on prime locations for College buildings (Fig. 49). Over a period of thirty years the College managed to buy and replace all of the houses, completely transforming North Main Street. Yet the new administrative and social halls managed to retain the mansion aesthetic that had long defined "Faculty Avenue" (Figs. 68-71). Rich began by grafting dormitory additions onto old houses, creating Sanborn Hall (1894) (Fig. 64) and Crosby Hall (1896) (Fig. 37).¹⁷⁵ The College returned the Quimby House to its original name of Hubbard House and built New Hubbard (1906) (Fig. 33) a short distance behind it. Rich also added to the rear of the building where he had himself taken classes, the old Chandler Scientific Building (1897-8) (Fig. 72). The College renamed the 1835 building Moor Hall, reflecting Moor's Indian Charity School, the eighteenth-century institution that was the building's first occupant.

The additions were only a transitional stage, however, and the College moved the old buildings back from the Green when it could. New Hubbard retreated just four years after the College finished it; only Crosby House survived.¹⁷⁶ Any building the College did not want to move, it demolished, including the small Dartmouth National Bank (1870). On the empty sites Charles Rich designed such imposing brick halls as College, Tuck, Parkhurst and Robinson. These buildings stand back from the street to a uniform facade line, regularizing the old houses' relation to the Green and the Old Row opposite. The academic buildings do not replace their predecessors exactly one-for-one, since they magnify and standardize the intervals that existed between the old houses. The place that once bore the name Faculty Avenue had become Administration Row.

The College built a second line of buildings parallel to North Main Street that also faced the Green. Houses that survived Administration Row by moving here soon fell to the three Massachusetts dormitories (1907 and 1912) and the later buildings that aligned with them. Rich aligned the center axis of Massachusetts Hall with the north door of Dartmouth Hall to link the two complexes across the Green (Fig. 2). Massachusetts also encloses a small space behind Tuck and the later Parkhurst, though it is a space that does not compete with the Green.¹⁷⁷

The College's most sensitive planning decision becomes apparent only in an absence of buildings. The Green, representing the largest, flattest and most central piece of open land in Hanover, survived the College's encroachment (Fig. 73). This survival was not inevitable, for the space had been a potential building site in the past. Decades after the original buildings of the College disappeared from the southeast corner, the Trustees in 1827 formed a committee that would "enquire into the expediency of taking up at the present time any part of the College Green for the accommodation of the College." The next year the board voted instead to seed the Green and surround it with a fence, which finally happened in 1836.¹⁷⁸ A temporary wooden dining hall and a large tent served the College Centennial celebration of 1869, but nothing permanent occupied the space.¹⁷⁹ When local resident D.B. Currier began to build a bandstand at the Green's southeast corner in 1884, the College asserted its title and stopped the project; students soon burned the building.¹⁸⁰ The College did set up a "senior fence" on the Green in the 1890s, possibly near the northeast edge. Students suggested in 1899 that the structure move to the more populated southwest corner in 1899, where it remains.¹⁸¹ Depictions of students playing cricket show that the Green, or the Campus as most called it into the twentieth century, was a College playground from an early date. The College eventually elevated the space to sacred ground. By not placing buildings on the Green, Rich showed both his delicate respect for tradition and his agreement with a rule so clear no one needed mention it.