Dartmouth’s new school

Posted on 09.06.2010 by Regisseur

President Kim has announced the establishment of the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science (press release, The Dartmouth, Valley News).

Following the habit of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice or “T.D.I.,” the new institution is being called “T.D.C.,” for “The Dartmouth Center.”

T.D.I. already awards master’s degrees, and T.D.C. is planning to do so. Even if the former institution were not expected to be absorbed by the latter, one might predict that a name change will be in order soon.

The word “Center” suggests a policy office or programming fund. (Cf. the Georgetown University Law Center, which is a law school rather than a legal aid clinic.) Dartmouth’s existing centers — Hopkins, Collis, Rockefeller, Dickey, Leslie and Visual Arts do not award degrees. The foundations that do award degrees are titled “College” or “School.” Only the word “Institute” is used in more than one way, by the degree-granting Dartmouth Institute, as noted above, and by the Ethics Institute, which is grouped formally with the centers. The new foundation seems to refrain from calling itself an “Institute” because that name is already taken.

President Kim’s foundation could be a Tucker-caliber move, an early identification of a need for a novel form of graduate-level education. The new foundation will be prominent and could end up with a public character more like that of the Tuck School than of T.D.I. Therefore one might predict that the name eventually will be changed (a) to refer to the donor, who is anonymous at the moment; (b) to omit the word “Dartmouth” or move it to the end (“the ____ Center at Dartmouth College”); and (c) to reflect the institution’s ambitions and authority by becoming an actual “School,” or at least an “Institute.”

At the very least this new foundation will occasion a change in Dartmouth’s academic heraldry:

Detail of Dartmouth academic heraldry from T.D.C. website

Detail from T.D.C. website.

The professional schools have been adopting coats of arms in parallel to that of Dartmouth over the past 60 years, most recently at Thayer School. Neither T.D.I. nor the Graduate Studies Program, which is not yet a school, has joined the pattern. But at least G.S.P. has its Lone Pine; T.D.I., with only a logotype, would seem to be the only degree-granting body left out of the group. The above grouping includes T.D.I. and the medical center because it is meant to identify the partners of T.D.C.

[It seems to appropriate to mention the example of the “Harvard Chief” and its role in unifying Harvard’s various frank and memorable coats of arms, such as those of the Schools of Engineering and Law.]

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[Update 06.09.2013: Broken link to Harvard Engineering arms replaced.]

Changes at the Inn

Posted on 08.06.2010 by Regisseur

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

Posted on 04.06.2010 by Regisseur

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.]

Pong as worthy of study

Posted on 02.06.2010 by Regisseur

Judging from the papers and a 2005 visit, pong has been growing more popular and also more susceptible to careful study with an eye to history and aesthetics. (See The Dartmouth (2005), The Dartmouth Independent (2005 summer tournament, interesting), (2009).)

It is inevitable that an art exhibit would result (The Dartmouth).

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[Update 12.02.2012: Broken links to Dartmouth Independent articles removed.]

“Cribbing,” i.e. cheating

Posted on 31.05.2010 by Regisseur

Rauner has an article on a wooden-roller crib sheet crafted by a member of the class of 1893. “Cribbing” (cheating) seems to have been widely practiced and talked about in nineteenth-century colleges.

An 1873 article[1] purports to reprint an 1844 letter discussing the practice of buying from a doctor a fake certificate that would excuse a student from classes. The class histories written for Class Day refer often to cheating, such as those of 1879 (describing a student’s “elaborately-written cribs” and the help given by a nearby student during an exam)[2] and 1883.[3] Professor Edwin Bartlett wrote that an employee of the Dartmouth Hotel once confessed to have stolen exam questions from his room in the 1879-1881 period.[4] “I never should have guessed it from the papers handed in,” Bartlett wrote.

A relatively late comment on cribs appears in a 1910 essay in the Jack-O-Lantern: “They are found in meny shapes and everybuddy youses um.”[5]

Last month The Dartmouth published a three-part series on cheating.

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[1] “The Reprobate Sophs,” The Dartmouth 7:9 (November 1873), 361-64.
[2] Daniel Arthur Rollins, “History of the Class of Seventy-nine. Dartmouth College” (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth Class of 1879, 1878), 32.
[3] William White Niles, “Chronicles,” in “Exercises of Class Day at Dartmouth College, Tuesday, June 26, 1883” (Hanover, N.H.: Class of 1883, 1883), 37.
[4] Edwin 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), 43.
[5] Willie [___], “Essay on Cribs,” Jack-O-Lantern 2:5 (February 1910), [n.p.].

Graphic design and signage

Posted on 30.05.2010 by Regisseur

The library had a contest to select a design for its new favicon/logo, formerly the tilted D. The winners (pdf) are surprisingly heraldic.

This might have been mentioned before, but the staff in the DMS shield has been genericized. It used to be an Indian-head cane.

Dartmouth has its own typeface, or at least the capital letters for a typeface, writes the Rauner blog. Will Carter designed Dartmouth title (Rauner’s sample) around 1969 for use in inscriptions in the teak panels in the Hopkins Center. The present king of collegiate typefaces seems to be Matthew Carter’s ca. 2008 Yale (see also Yale Daily News article), although Frederic Goudy’s 1938 University Old Style for Berkeley is an earlier example that lives on in Richard Beatty’s 1994 redrawing as UC Berkeley Old Style.

For years, Smith College tapped into certain associations (unintentionally?) by using ITC Garamond, which paralleled the Apple Garamond of Apple Computer advertisements at the time (Wikipedia on Apple typography; Smith’s current Visual Identity Program). The quality of the design itself is important, and distinctiveness is not everything (see the Typotheque article on the modification of Brioni for Al Gore).

With the Visual Arts Center about to go up next door to the Hopkins Center, it’s time to finally commission an artist (Colossal Media, say) to paint signs on the Hop’s largely-blank rear walls. The walls of Spaulding Auditorium (Street View) and the huge fly loft at the rear of the Moore Theater are ripe for advertisement.

Sign concept for west facade of studio row, Hopkins Center (partially based on a photo from http://philip.greenspun.com).

The destruction of a genuine ghost sign at the unique industrial/commercial campus of the University of Washington, Tacoma recently caused some controversy (News Tribune).

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Smith program fixed.]

Rauner’s blog keeps going

Posted on 29.05.2010 by Regisseur

Rauner Library’s blog has sent out a raft of interesting illustrated posts lately, on Howard Lines 1912 and his memorial in Baker; SS Dartmouth Victory, a Victory Ship; Adrian Bouchard, Dartmouth’s official photographer from 1937 to 1976, except for the 1941-1945 period; Orozco and his frescoes in Baker; and gravestones of the Risley family, stonecutters in the early nineteenth century.

[Update 07.28.2010: Erroneous Bouchard years 1837 to 1876 corrected.]

The Alumni Magazine on architecture

Posted on 01.05.2010 by Regisseur

The May/June 2010 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine focuses on architecture and includes “Alumni Opinion: Return of the Critic” by William Morgan and “Architectural Digest” by C.J. Hughes. The latter article profiles alumni architects and makes the case for the quality of Dartmouth’s architectural education. I would like to read a history of that education some time, going back through instructors Banwell and the Hunters to Larson and Keyes and eventually, in the 1850s, to the Chandler School.

The Chandler School, on the vacant lot south of Blunt. The top floor of the rear addition was a skylit drafting studio. The building was expanded twice by alumni architects, both of whom had studied architecture inside. The frame building at left is Hubbard Hall, a temporary dormitory.

[Update 06.15.2010: The DAM article is up.]

The old Howe Library’s stacks addition

Posted on 17.04.2010 by Regisseur

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.

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.

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.]

Fraternity to demolish historic Webster Avenue house

Posted on 13.04.2010 by Regisseur

Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity is planning to demolish its 1896 house at 11 Webster Avenue. It will submit its application for site plan review to the Planning Board on April 20th.

Historic Sigma Phi Epsilon House at Dartmouth before demolition

11 Webster Avenue in 2005

The clapboard house, attributed to Boston architects Dwight & Chandler, was built for math professor Thomas W.D. Worthen of the Class of 1872. The house was part of an original row of six contemporary faculty dwellings by the same firm.

The society occupied the house for more than 50 years and added the large righthand wing by well-known local architects Alfred T. Granger & Associates in 1958.

The fraternity has obtained a special exception [ZBA Minutes 02.04.2010 pdf] from the zoning board to erect a new building on the site.

Sig Ep’s house is not the most exciting one on the Avenue, but still, the Town should ask the group to document the existing structure before demolishing it (Claremont documents the historic buildings it demolishes).

Better yet, the fraternity should voluntarily document its own house before tearing it down. Although not the same as preservation, it would be better than nothing.

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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken links to two pdfs removed.]
[Update 05.01.2010: Sig Ep at Wisconsin, rebuilding its house after a fire, had to win approval for the design from the local Landmarks Commission. The house is located in a historic district.]

[Update 07.28.2010: The Dartmouth has a drawing of the front facade of the replacement. Planning Board minutes (04.20.2010 pdf) suggest that Domus, Inc. of Etna is participating in the project.]

Publications, including a 1954 Carnival film

Posted on 12.04.2010 by Regisseur

This has probably been mentioned here before: “Dartmouth by Air,” a video by the Media Production Group, is worth watching.

The red jeep visible alongside the Green in this postcard appears in a 1954 film. Bill Miles '56 notes in the comments that he played Freddy and that Bob Black '56 played Eddy in the film. The Alpha Delta house stands in for a dormitory in the serenade scene.

Rauner’s blog has several photos of skijoring at Carnival.

Transcripts of President Hopkins’s oral-history interviews from 1958 to 1964 are now available (see also Rauner blog).

Steve Waterhouse '65 has written A Passion for Skiing about Dartmouth’s contribution to the skiing industry (Vail Today).

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[Update 05.12.2013: Broken link to Vail Today fixed.]
[Update 11.17.2012: Broken postcard link fixed.]

Sigourney Weaver as Eleazar Wheelock

Posted on 12.04.2010 by Regisseur

In Avatar (2009), colonist Jake is surprised to learn that some of the native Na’vi speak English. He asks and is told that they learned English at Dr. Augustine’s School. This exchange mirrors one in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) in which Cora asks Hawkeye how he learned to speak English, and he replies:

My father sent Uncas & I to Reverend Wheelock’s school when I was ten.

(From the Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe script, not in Cooper’s original — although Susan F. Cooper discusses Wheelock in her introduction to later editions such as the 1876 edition.)

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[Update 12.02.2012: Broken link to Mohicans and script at IMDB fixed.]

Olympics, skiing, and Carnival posters

Posted on 21.03.2010 by Regisseur

The US News article on college Olympians (see also USA Today and Dartmouth’s recap) notes that Dartmouth’s is the first collegiate ski team. Another significant tradition is the the ski team’s organizational existence outside of the athletic department. The team is part of the outing club instead, following a 19th-century way of running things.

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, now on line with archives back to July 2008, has issues featuring the DOC Centennial (see also the Congressional recognition) and the Olympics.

Dartmouth Life has an article on Carnival posters that mentions Winter Carnival: A Century of Dartmouth Posters (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, forthcoming fall 2010).

Hanover engineer and architect Edgar H. Hunter, a 1901 graduate, designed promotional posters for the state’s ski industry, including one from 1935 pictured in E. John B. Allen’s New Hampshire on Skis (Arcadia, 2002), 2. His son Ted Hunter ’38 was an Olympic skier and also an architect.

New book on Native Americans and Dartmouth

Posted on 14.02.2010 by Regisseur

This looks interesting: Professor Colin Calloway’s The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).

(Curiously, the Press still uses Scotford’s short-lived 1960s shield rather than the standard MacDonald version of 1944/1957.)

Varied topics in history and architecture

Posted on 30.01.2010 by Regisseur

The Neukom Institute was rumored last year to be considering a request for an addition to Sudikoff.

Ledyard Canoe Club plans to rebuild Titcomb Cabin, which burned last spring. The logs will be put in the river at the Organic Farm and rafted down to Gilman Island. This will be the closest thing to a log drive seen on this stretch of the Connecticut in many years.

David Hooke (Reaching That Peak, 1987) gave a “smoke talk” in Commons on the Outing Club’s history. The Dartmouth reports that “smoke talk” refers to the club’s journal Woodsmoke, but it might also refer to the informal lectures of that name that took place in College Hall at the turn of the century.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates that, although not mentioning it, helps explain their Berry Library project.

Check out the buildings in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream.

The Dartmouth is doing a weekly articles on Dartmouth out-of-town, starting with the riding center at Morton Farm.

Dartmouth is offering for rent the second level of the 1910s library stacks addition to Eleazar Wheelock’s house. This could make a good society hall:

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to VSBA page fixed; broken link to rental page removed.]

Historic maps

Posted on 30.01.2010 by Regisseur

Rauner’s blog describes a fantastic horizontal-scrolling map of the Connecticut River at Hanover (image). It was created by Robert Fletcher around the turn of the twentieth century and was found among some records of the Hanover Water Works Co. that the library received recently. The shallow box containing the map is portable, and the map contains a number of notes on related facts.

This map could be scanned, stitched together, overlaid with a current aerial, and made into a fascinating website. A lot of the landmarks noted by Fletcher have probably been under several feet of water since Wilder Dam raised the river in the 1950s; yet the River was not pristine in Fletcher’s time, and he notes that the low-water level at Ledyard Bridge was raised by six feet by the dam at Olcott Falls (Wilder).

A UNH news story notes that one of the large and notable relief maps of the state created by Dartmouth’s Professor Hitchcock in the late 1870s is being restored. This particular map came to UNH in 1894, so it is probably not the one depicted on the east wall of the Butterfield Museum after that building opened in 1899.

Planning Dartmouth’s 250th

Posted on 17.01.2010 by Regisseur

Governor Wentworth signed Dartmouth’s charter — really more like its letters patent — on December 13, 1769. President Kim has made the 250th anniversary of this event in 2019 a sort of goal or endpoint for a ten-year budget process, such as in his October 26 faculty address (Vox), his presentation to the board at its fall meeting (The Dartmouth), and his December 1 financial presentation (pdf).

Although it is early to plan for the actual event, Professor Fischel’s letter to the editor of The Dartmouth suggests a new term: “quartomillennial” instead of “semiquincentennial.”

Varied topics

Posted on 31.12.2009 by Regisseur

The Valley News has a story on an 1840s organ that ended up in a Wilder church (1890) and is now being restored. Wilder’s Congregational church (presuming that is the building) originally had very close ties to Dartmouth and Charles Wilder, donor of the funds for Wilder Hall.

The President’s House renovation is being “paid for by donors who want to take the cost — for which the college has received some criticism — out of the budget, and off the list of items raised whenever spending cuts are mentioned” according to the Valley News. The Dartmouth also has the story.

The Dartmouth noted that the frame of the Life Sciences building was topped out in mid-December.

The early-2000s “decompression” of dormitory rooms has begun to seem a bit luxurious. The college might increase income by expanding the entering class by about 50 students (The Dartmouth), a move that might require turning some doubles back into triples and so on.

Tuck Today has two glossy features related to its new buildings: Jeff Moag, “Dedicated to the Future,” and Christopher Percy Collier, “What Lies Beneath.” The architects (Goody Clancy) have photos of the buildings.

Collier’s article “It Takes a Village” in Tuck Today is about Sachem Village, the grad/professional student housing site in Lebanon. It mentions the predecessor of Wigwam Circle, the postwar temporary housing group behind Thayer School. It is also worth noting that Dartmouth built another group of similar portable buildings for married students next to the high school, called Sachem Village.

Daniel Stewart Fraser of Dan & Whit’s in Norwich (“If we don’t have it, you don’t need it”) has died at 96. The Valley News has a story.

Bevy King in West Leb is expanding (Valley News).

Dartmo.

The Buildings of Dartmouth College

Category Archives: History