Category Archives: Hanover/Leb./Nor’ch.

About buildings in Hanover and Lebanon Townships, N.H., and Norwich, Vt. as they relate to Dartmouth College, which owns land in each place.

Hurricane Irene strikes the Upper Valley

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New Hampshire was comparatively fortunate, although the Upper Valley Plaza, the shopping center with Shaw’s and Kohl’s at the corner of 89 and Route 12A in West Lebanon, was flooded, as the Valley News reports. Repairs there will cost nearly $8 million.

Vermont is still suffering. The Valley News has a photo gallery and After the Storm coverage. The railroad bridge over the White River was rendered unusable. Residents built a temporary exit from Interstate 89 in Royalton.

See also the Rauner blog report on the Hurricane of 1938, which toppled many elms on campus, and the student efforts to help clean up after the Flood of 1927.

Adding to the Hanover Inn

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Dartmouth Now and print newsletters are publishing a rendering of the future Inn that shows a new porte-cochere, a modest expansion onto the Terrace, and, almost out of sight at the left, an expansion onto part of the Zahm Garden.

The rendering is by Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc., although it is not clear that the project will be undertaken by that firm.

The expansion could be very subtle and intriguing. It will put hotel rooms above the Gap on Main Street, in the existing upper level of the Lang Building. It will convert the Hopkins Center’s Strauss Gallery, at the northwest corner of the Hop, where the corridor makes a right-angle turn, into an entrance to the Inn (March 3, 2011 Building Code Advisory Committee minutes (pdf)).

[Update 07.17.2011: The Dartmouth reported Friday that the Inn has decided to close during construction, from December 2011 through April 12, 2012.]

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Radisson replaced.]

Hospital-related expansion, all the way out to Fort Harry’s

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Back in May, the Lebanon High School Times began reporting on a giant new building planned for Heater Road. The building and its parking lot will fill much of the northwest corner of Heater and Route 120:

This is is not particularly near to the hospital; in fact, that’s Fort Harry’s/Fort Lou’s/The Fort in the lower right. The third building up Heater Road, the one with smoke coming from the chimney, will be demolished to create an access road. A second access road will head west from the site, reaching all the way to Old Etna Road.

Chris Fleischer wrote in the Valley News:

On Heater Road in Lebanon, 11 acres of land has been cleared to make way for a $38 million medical office building that will be home to about 200 Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center physicians, nurses and staff.

While enjoying a fairly low profile in the press, this project is not exactly new. A Lebanon wetland permit for the project is dated July 2008 (pdf). Fleischer’s article notes that the building was first proposed by a different group in 2006.

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[Update 11.11.2013: Broken link to Lebanon High School Times removed.

[Update 07.08.2012: The hospital’s “D-H Heater Road” building is depicted in an issue of Skylight magazine (pdf). A Bing aerial of the building under construction:]


Intriguing details of the Inn addition

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The upcoming $12 million project at the Hanover Inn has a number of intriguing aspects. The first detailed story about it appeared in the Valley News last week, and the news has been picked up by NECN and WCAX. The Dartmouth Real Estate Office is running the project but appears to have dropped its “projects” webpage.

This is the kind of project that planners have been thinking about for decades. According to Alex Hanson’s story in the Valley News, builders will erect 12,000 square feet of additions between the Inn and the Hopkins Center and over a portion of the existing terrace facing Wheelock Street.



The terrace will shrink; the existing parking garage under the terrace will expand by ten spaces, presumably beneath the Zahm Garden/Drake Room portion of the expansion; the Inn’s existing restaurants will be pulled from the bowels of the building to storefronts on both Main and Wheelock Streets, an excellent idea; and the existing upper-level conference rooms will be divided into guest rooms.

This part of the project, explained in last week’s Valley News story, is particularly interesting:

The renovation would create guest rooms where now there are offices and meeting space in the Lang Building — the brick building next to the inn on Main Street that houses The Gap. The inn and Lang are already linked by passageways, but the new project requires the building to be brought up to code. Building code doesn’t allow openings between buildings on separate lots, and the financing of the two buildings makes it impossible to combine the lots, college officials wrote in filings with the town.

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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to Globe replaced with link to NECN.]

Preparing for the expansion of the Inn

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Dartmouth has obtained a minor lot line adjustment that annexes 22,400 square feet to the Hanover Inn’s lot, finally reflecting the building’s actual size. This will allow for future expansion (Planning Board meeting 4 January 2011 (pdf)).

From a newsletter of more than four years ago:

The Hanover Inn is in the early planning stages of building renovations to include the guest rooms, 1st floor conference rooms, and main floor kitchen, dining and lobby areas. Carl Pratt, the Inn’s General Manager, together with the Planning Design & Construction (PD&C) Office, initiated master planning with the architectural firm Truex Cullins & Partners in Burlington, VT to identify structural deficiencies and to develop design ideas. The Inn is working with PD&C and the Real Estate Office to understand zoning implications for any recommended changes to the current building footprint.

“Changes at the Hanover Inn,” Dartmouth College Finance and Administration News 1:1 (16 January 2007), 3 (pdf).

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s campus architecture blog, Buildings & Grounds, last month linked to a story on the Inn’s new management.

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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to pdf removed.]
[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to “Changes” article fixed.]

Inn project to include addition?

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Board chairman Stephen Mandel’s January 13th letter to the Dartmouth community mentions so many new spaces going into the renovated Inn that the building’s envelope surely must be expanding:

In addition, the “front door” to the College, the Hanover Inn, is planned to undergo a complete renovation beginning this summer. Every aspect of the inn will be touched and will result in a larger number of guest rooms, all updated, new and relocated restaurants, and modern conference facilities. The College remains the owner of the inn but we have hired a third party to manage the inn. The renovation will be funded with mortgage debt and the proceeds of the sale of the Minary Conference Center in Holderness, N.H.

The idea of having a standard conference center near Hanover has been mentioned in past master plans:

Finally, the College is exploring the feasibility of a regional conference center to further enable the dissemination of scholarship.

Lo-Yi Chan, et al., Dartmouth College Master Plan (2002), 10 (11.3mb pdf).

A conventional conference center could probably be a moneymaker, but it is hard to see how could fit on the corner of Wheelock and Main.

Dartmouth Traditions by William Carroll Hill (1901)

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Download

Download a pdf version of William Carroll Hill’s 1901 book, Dartmouth Traditions.

About the Book

William Carroll Hill (1875-1943?), of Nashua, N.H., received his Bachelor of Letters degree, a degree offered only between 1884 and 1904, in 1902. He was the historian of his class and wrote the Chronicles section of the the 1902 Class Day volume, a book that the printer gave the appearance as Dartmouth Traditions. Hill became an antiquarian, genealogist, and historian and apparently wrote a history of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Dartmouth Traditions was published when Hill was a junior. The book is not really about traditions and probably would be better titled Dartmouth Worthies. It is a collection of essays written by students and alumni. While the essays on Daniel Webster and other known personages are not very useful, some essays appear the contain information that is only available in this book. Examples are the report on the investigation into the history of the Lone Pine and the first-person account of the drowning death of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son.

About this Project

The transcription of this somewhat hard-to-find book began in 2003. The book has since become available in Google Books, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the project. The Google Books version has the great advantage of reproducing the attractive typography of the original, but its computer transcription is not as accurate as that of the version presented here.

[Update 05.13.2011: The Rauner Library Blog has a post on Hill, highlighting the Stowe episode.]

[Update 12.21.2010: Link to pdf posted.]

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The Upper Valley Subway

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Inspired by Transit Authority Figures (see the Daily Hampshire Gazette), as well as my beloved Metro and of course Advance Transit, here’s a mockup of a map for a Hanover-area subway system (pdf).

Upper Valley Subway map by Scott Meacham

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[Update 08.06.2016: Thayer School Dean Robert Fletcher “drew up plans in 1899 for a subway line running between Hanover and White River Junction” (Lee Michaelides, “In the Beginning,” Dartmouth Engineer Magazine).]

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The wartime origins of Sachem Village

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The Tuck School has a gallery of photos of Sachem Village, the married-student housing site south of Hanover.

One 1946 photo shows the earliest Sachem buildings when they still occupied their original location in Hanover, behind Thayer School. Some or all of the prefabricated buildings had begun as wartime housing for shipyard workers. The view from the west shows how the lower of the two types of buildings were arranged in a circle called Wigwam Circle. This quick composite of stills from a 1946 film linked from the Dartmouth Film Archive shows Wigwam Circle from the east looking west:

composite of stills from 1946 film showing Wigwam Circle west of Thayer School, Hanover, N.H.

The dorms that later occupied the site were initially called Wigwam Circle and later the River Cluster.

The two-story buildings visible in the rear of the 1946 photo linked at the top of this post appear again in a 1954 photo at the current location of Sachem Village. (I believe some of the other prefab buildings for married students ended up north of town at Rivercrest.)

Sachem Village has been redeveloped in recent years (see Trumbull-Nelson and Pathways Consulting), and I have no idea whether any of its wartime buildings remain. It seems unlikely.

To confuse matters, the name of the present Sachem Village appears to have come from Dartmouth’s other group of prefab buildings for married students — the counterpart to Wigwam Circle — which stood on Lebanon Street next to Hanover High. Here is a composite of stills from the same 1946 film showing this housing project, the original “Sachem Village”:

composite of stills from 1946 film showing Sachem Village, Lebanon Street, Hanover, N.H.

A 1947 film from the same collection has some good closeups of Wigwam Circle and the original Sachem Village on Lebanon Street at the 8:57 mark.

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[Update 11.23.2014: Images adjusted, cropped.]
[Update 11.21.2010: Link to 1947 film added.]
[Update 11.20.2010: Images and links to film added.]

Recent Dartmouth-related notes not involving construction

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Various tidbits not related to construction:

  • Google has supplemented its car-based Street View coverage of Hanover and Lebanon by sending in a tricycle-mounted camera (The Dartmouth). New images will be up next year. Meanwhile some places, such as the University of Texas, are getting 45-degree aerial views, presumably taken from an airplane.
  • Professor Schweitzer’s Occom Circle Project involves digitizing and posting Samson Occom’s writings (The Dartmouth, Dartmouth Now). The project doesn’t seem to have a page yet.
  • Rauner’s blog has a copy of an early-1900s broadside advertising a ban on nude swimming near Ledyard Bridge, and a bit on the legendary Doc Benton.
  • As everybody knows, BlitzMail is going away. An oblitzuary.
  • Ask Dartmouth writes about the Old Pine Lectern.
  • Ken Burns wrote in American Heritage that his favorite baseball photograph is an 1882 image showing a Dartmouth-Harvard game on the northwest corner of the Green. Photographer Joseph Mehling has paired that photo with shots from a recent softball game on the northeast corner, with President Kim pitching.
  • This excellent fantastical map of the campus by Matthieu and Zachary Pierce is called “Dartmouth Dreaming.”
  • Administrative reports and presidential announcements, such as the Reaccreditation Self-Study, now regularly mention the planning for the 2019 Quartomillennium.
  • The Dartmouth Sports site has been redesigned and is now a little less busy.

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[Update 12.02.2012: Broken link to Google post at the blog of The Dartmouth removed; broken link to 1992 American Heritage article removed.]

Changes at the Inn

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Dartmouth, which owns the Hanover Inn and the mostly-1960s building it inhabits, recently decided to get out of the business of running a hotel and will turn over the Inn’s management to Carpenter & Co. (The Dartmouth, Valley News, more Valley News, press release on the search).

The Inn has had plans for what appears to be an interior renovation for some time now. It is not clear how the switch affect these plans.

The outsourcing of the Inn’s management is part of a long and shifting relationship. The first tavern on the corner was officially sited by Dartmouth, which conveyed the land to Ebenezer Brewster for the purpose. Brewster was a careful selection: he was made the Steward of Dartmouth College and was granted a tavern license by local authorities who were friendly to the college and in some cases would have been Dartmouth professors.

That was in the 1770s. Buildings came and went on the same site on the corner. After about 40 years the tavern, which had probably always housed paying guests, became the Dartmouth Hotel. It continued for another 85 years or so as an “independent” operation.

After the Dartmouth Hotel burned in 1887, the college bought the land. The college had a succession of intentions. At first it seems only to have wanted to sell the land to a sufficiently reputable hotelier and let him replace the building. Then it decided to erect the building itself and lease out the hotel to an independent manager. (I think it did try leasing out the building in this way for a time.) Eventually the school decided that it would not only own the building but operate it too.

Dartmouth operated the Wheelock Hotel in its new building, renaming the hotel as the Hanover Inn in 1902. The Inn’s operators played up Brewster’s history, putting an image (or a supposed image) of him on the Inn’s sign. The same jolly man of girth also appeared on the sign of the Inn’s motel — the Hanover Inn Motor Lodge — and lent his name to a nearby dormitory for Inn employees.

Dartmouth demolished the 1887 Inn in 1966 and hired a hotel architect to replace it.

Architecture topics in the Upper Valley

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  • Keep checking the Six South Street Hotel blog for construction photos.
  • The New York Times had an article back in 2008 on the legal incentives to identifying “ancient roads” in Vermont. It brings to mind the observations of Christopher Lenney in Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England (2005).
  • The Hanover Conservation Council provides maps and other information on sites including Mink Brook and Fullington Farm, the latter in the news because it is the site of the boathouse of the Hanover High crew.
  • The St. Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, just a few miles away from Hanover, has purchased Blow-Me-Down Farm (Valley News).
  • Alumni Relations has a gallery of campus trees. Number 7 is the Parkhurst Elm.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Mink Brook replaced and Fullington Farm removed.]

The old Howe Library’s stacks addition

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A recent post mentioned that the second floor of the brick addition to the old house at 2 West Wheelock Street is available for rent.

Howe stacks addition
Stacks addition, east facade, view to northwest

Here is some more information on the addition:

In 1900, Emily Howe established the Howe Library in the house where she had grown up (Eleazar Wheelock’s Mansion House, built in 1771 with funds sent from London for the purpose). Howe died in 1912 and left much of her estate to the library corporation, which hired architect Curtis W. Bixby of Watertown, Mass. to design a fireproof addition for book stacks. The addition was built in 1914 and 1915 and displays a level of detail that is unexpected for a background building.

Howe stacks addition
Stacks addition, entrance in east facade

The Howe moved to its current location in the early 1970s and the old building became a shop, with Roberts Flowers of Hanover moving in during 1990.

Another Bixby building of 1915 is the Coolidge School in Watertown, which he designed with Clarence P. Hoyt. The school is now an apartment building and shares some elements with the Howe’s stacks addition.

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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to Roberts Flowers replaced.]