Yes, students built a bonfire in 1888. They were celebrating a baseball victory over Manchester that April.¹Dartmouth Baseball, “All-Time Game-by-Game Results,” available at http://goo.gl/NUsk7k (viewed 26 October 2014). The Dartmouth wrote that “[t]he convulsive joy of the underclassmen burst forth on the night of the first Manchester game in the form of a huge Campus fire. It disturbed the slumbers of a peaceful town, destroyed some property, made the boys feel like they were men and in fact did no one any good.”²Editor, The Dartmouth (4 May 1888), quoted in “Who designs and builds the homecoming bonfire? What’s the history behind it?,” Ask Dartmouth (updated 20 October 2011), at http://ask.dartmouth.edu/categories/stulife/24.html (viewed 26 October 2014).

For some reason, people keep saying that that was the bonfire that started it all.³See Rauner Library Blog (16 October 2011), at http://raunerlibrary.blogspot.com/2011_10_16_archive.html (viewed 26 October 2014); “Who designs and builds the homecoming bonfire? What’s the history behind it?,” Ask Dartmouth (updated 20 October 2011), at http://ask.dartmouth.edu/categories/stulife/24.html (viewed 26 October 2014). Bonfires were spontaneous things in the nineteenth century, and it is not clear why there has to be a “first” one. At any rate, that 1888 bonfire — lit after a springtime baseball victory — wasn’t the first bonfire built by students in Hanover by any means.

For example, as one alumnus recalled, the baseball victory over Williams of June⁴Dartmouth Baseball, “All-Time Game-by-Game Results.” of 1887, nearly a year before the Manchester game, involved a bonfire:

After supper the celebration is begun by songs on the campus fence, and as soon as it is really dark a bonfire is built in the campus, and every man’s unprotected woodpile is levied on for the purpose. Then a line is formed again and marches through the principal streets. A stop is made at the house of every member of the faculty, and he must make a speech and be cheered also. At length the bonfire burns low, and the cheering ceases, and it is the dead of night.⁵William Byron Forbush, quoted in Harold Seymour, Baseball: The People’s Game (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 145-146.

And before that:

• May of 1874: “Serenade your instructors occasionally, burn somebody’s chicken coop.”⁶”Editorial Department,” The Dartmouth 8:5 (May 1874), 187.
• During March of 1874, a student wrote of a grand bonfire on the campus fed with fence rails and dry-goods boxes and kindled with kerosene.⁷”The Spirit of ’76,” The Dartmouth 8:3 (March 1874), 98.
• Also ca. 1874: “‘Extra curriculum activities’ included occasional pranks like hanging somebody’s wagon in a tree, or getting a horse into chapel, or having a sort of spontaneous bonfire on the campus, for which loose material was swiped from back yards, — such as barrels, boxes, a stray ladder of, in extreme cases a part of a fence.”⁸Robert Fletcher, “Hanover Scenes in Word Pictures Sixty Years Ago” part 3, “Town Meetings and Travel,” The Hanover Gazette (March 22, 1934), 1.
• Ca. 1868-1872, students participated in “[t]he lawless collection of materials for a celebrating bonfire and heaping of all the gates in the middle of the Green.”⁹Edwin J. Bartlett, A Dartmouth Book of Remembrance: Pen and Camera Sketches of Hanover and the College before the Centennial and after (Hanover, N.H.: The Webster Press, 1922), 66-68. Bartlett also wrote of student-built fires blazing in “Mere Football,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine 19, no. 1 (November 1926), 20.
• (Not to mention the bonfires built by townsfolk during February of 1819 when news of the College victory in the Supreme Court reached town.¹⁰Samuel Brown, “Historical Address,” Dartmouth Centennial Celebration (1870), 33. Rufus Choate also heard of the lighting of bonfires and “other unseemly demonstrations of joy” at the time. Rufus Choate to brother (25 March 1819), quoted in Clyde Edward Dankert, “Dartmouth College and Dartmouth University” typewritten MS (1979), 145, citing Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (February 1969), 24.)

After the non-milestone of the 1888 Manchester baseball bonfire, students would keep on building bonfires independently of Dartmouth Night for a good half-century. Sometimes they did not even need an intercollegiate athletic victory.

During September of 1888, a ten-boat regatta of the Dartmouth Boating Association traveled three miles upriver and built bonfires on the “second island.”¹¹Robert Fletcher, “Hanover Scenes in Word Pictures Sixty Years Ago” part 5, The Hanover Gazette (April 5, 1934), 1. In November of 1893, students built “an honest bonfire”¹²The Dartmouth (ca. November 1893) (“It was an honest victory and appropriately celebrated with an honest bonfire.”), quoted in Will Meland, “Bonfire burns bright for more than century of change,” The Dartmouth (27 October 2000), available at http://goo.gl/Wd7nYi (viewed 1 November 2014). on the Green after the football team defeated Amherst. During the fall of 1896, the Dartmouth-only freshman-sophomore football game was followed by a bonfire.¹³Leonard Wason Tuttle, “Chronicles,” Book of the Class of 1900 (ca. 1900), 40. The Aegis wrote of this event: “The Freshmen have a small fire on the Campus, and cut up $200 worth of hose with the jack-knives their papas gave them when they left home.” Dartmouth Class of 1899, Aegis 1899 (1897), 173. In September of 1901, the Webster Centennial celebration saw a parade end on the Green, where a bonfire was lit.¹⁴”After a Century,” Boston Herald (25 September 1901), 3. There were fireworks afterward.

During November of 1903, the “stay-at-homes” listened to a reading of the telegraph reports of the football victory over Harvard at the first game in its new Stadium: “When the last message arrived, the students withdrew to collect material for a huge bonfire — and the work was not confined to the Freshman class!”¹⁵The Dartmouth (25 November 1903), in Edward Connery Lathem and David M. Shribman, eds., Miraculously Builded in Our Hearts: A Dartmouth Reader (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, distributed by University Press of New England, 1999), 28. After a meeting in Dartmouth Hall’s Old Chapel and a parade, “[t]he fire was lighted at 8:30 o’clock, and it was one of the biggest blazes in recent years. Around the fire the men sang songs and cheered wildly, and then indulged in a nightshirt parade, which ended one of the most memorable athletic celebrations in Dartmouth’s history.”¹⁶The Dartmouth (25 November 1903), in Lathem and Shribman, 29. During October of 1904, students built a bonfire on the Green and had a “nightshirt parade” around the fire.¹⁷Royal Parkinson to father (30 October 1904), in Lathem and Shribman, 43.

Skipping ahead to 1919, the springtime handover of student government from one Palaeopitus class to the next involved a bonfire in which Freshmen were allowed finally to dispose of their Freshman Beanies.¹⁸Clifford B. Orr to family (9 June 1919), in Lathem and Shribman, 99.

Wait a minute, what about Dartmouth Night? Yes, President Tucker established Dartmouth Night during the fall of 1895, but it was an indoor event, in the Old Chapel in Dartmouth Hall. A bonfire simply was not a part of the original event.¹⁹Cf. Rauner Library Blog (16 October 2011), at http://raunerlibrary.blogspot.com/2011_10_16_archive.html (viewed 26 October 2014). Between 1901 and 1906, the location of Dartmouth Night shifted between outdoor sites (the College Yard below Dartmouth Hall as well as Alumni Oval, the proto-Memorial Field) and indoor sites (Commons, a.k.a. Collis Commonground). Dartmouth Night would move to its long-term indoor site of Webster Hall in 1907.

It was apparently not until the 1920s, perhaps the late 1920s, that Dartmouth Night began to include a pre-game rally and bonfire. In 1930, for example, the ceremony seems to have evolved into a Friday evening torchlight parade to the President’s House for a short talk on spirit, followed by a bonfire on the Green.²⁰Richard N. Campen letter (11 November 1930), in Lathem and Shribman, 136. At that 1930 bonfire, students sang (football) songs and gave (football) yells in honor of the last home game,²¹Campen in Lathem and Shribman, 136. which would occur the following day. In 1931, Dartmouth Night was celebrated with what were described as “all of the traditional accompaniments, including the bonfire on the campus.”²²”News of the College,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (December 1931), 175.

Even attaching a pre-game bonfire to an outdoor Dartmouth Night did not reduce the annual number of fires to one. Students were still building multiple bonfires each year, including big ones for Dartmouth Night and Houseparties Weekend,²³See, for example, Forrester Maphis and John S. Hatfield, eds., Aegis 1950 (1950), 56. into the mid- or late-1960s. Eventually, possibly after the campus turmoil of the Vietnam era had subsided, students would build only one bonfire each year, in the fall, on Dartmouth Night. Even later, that weekend — today still known officially as “Dartmouth Night Weekend” — would become popularly known as “Homecoming.”

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