A Passion for Snow and other notes

Posted on 26.09.2012 by Regisseur

Here in Hanover ran a profile of architect Randall Mudge in its Spring 2011 issue (pdf).
David’s House at CHaD is adding a wing (Valley News).
This unusual stucco house at 28 East Wheelock has a whiff of Larson about it; it is owned by the college (see Dartmouth Real Estate):
A trailer for the upcoming Dartmouth ski documentary A Passion for Snow is available.
A map art company is selling a print of a stylized map of the campus.
Something big has happened to 8 Occom Ridge:

The later aerial views from Google and Bing (below) appear to show a replacement:
A Dartmouth shirt sold on eBay says “Go Green and White.” Hmmm.
The Development Office has its own in-house PR firm, the Office of Development Communications.
An article on archeology in Columbia, Connecticut explains that the first building of Moor’s Indian Charity School still stands, on a later foundation.
Both the renovated Hanover High and the new Richmond Middle School have biomass plants. It is hard to imagine that any future Dartmouth heating plant would not rely at least in part on burning wood chips.
The Dartmouth Planner reports that the Town of Hanover is beginning to rewrite its zoning ordinances.
Last spring, van Zelm Heywood & Shadford helped renovate Burke Chemistry Laboratory (The Dartmouth).
A recent photo of the roof of the expanded Hayward Room at the Inn, taken with the Class of 1966 Webcam:

Wilder to be plaqued

Posted on 19.09.2012 by Regisseur

Dartmouth Now reports that Wilder Laboratory has been added to the American Physical Society’s list of historic sites. More than 110 years ago, Ernest Fox Nichols and Gordon Ferrie Hull conducted experiments in the building to measure the pressure of light. Their work will be the subject of a symposium during October.

The building’s history certainly deserves recognition. One hopes, however, that Dartmouth isn’t actually planning to alter Wilder’s historic and “largely unchanged” front facade by bolting a commemorative plaque to it, as is suggested by the Dartmouth Now article. Perhaps a freestanding granite monument or an interior wall would be the most respectful place for the plaque.

Masting Pines

Posted on 10.09.2012 by Regisseur

Governor Wentworth’s 1771 grants of land to Dartmouth and Wheelock contained this interesting condition:

That all White and other Pine Trees fit for Masting our Royal Navy be carefully preserved for that use & none to be cut or felld without our special License for so doing first had & obtained on penalty of the forfeiture of the Right of the Grantee in the Premises his Heirs & Assigns to us our Heirs and Successors as well as being subject to the Penalties prescribed by any present as well as future Act or Acts of Parliament.¹John Wentworth, Grant to Dartmouth College and Eleazar Wheelock (19 December 1771), in Albert Stillman Batchellor, ed., State of New Hampshire. Town Charters Granted within the Present Limits of New Hampshire (Concord, N.H.: Edward N. Pearson, Public Printer, 1895), 87-88.

Wheelock apparently got into some trouble later when pines fit for masting were discovered downriver with his blaze on them.

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 [+]

References
↑1	John Wentworth, Grant to Dartmouth College and Eleazar Wheelock (19 December 1771), in Albert Stillman Batchellor, ed., State of New Hampshire. Town Charters Granted within the Present Limits of New Hampshire (Concord, N.H.: Edward N. Pearson, Public Printer, 1895), 87-88.

“Goat Room” and other terms

Posted on 27.08.2012 by Regisseur

A thorough post on the use of goats in fraternity imagery covers the use of the term “goat room” to describe a meeting room. That term has been used a number of Dartmouth houses including Tri-Kap, Beta Theta Pi, Phi Gamma Delta, Zeta Psi, Sigma Nu, and Psi Upsilon. The first Goat Room built by Beta is visible at the far right of a photo on the Town’s Flickr photostream.
Bob Donin’s 2011 oral history interview with William Jenkins ’43 and his wife Mary contains these linguistic observations on page 18:

MARY: […] And the other thing that’s interesting—and I’ve talked about this to my few good friends who are still around who grew up here—when we said campus, we meant the Green. And it was never called the Green.

DONIN: Oh, it wasn’t called the Green back then?

MARY: Well, at least not by any of us. Never used the word Green. And when we said campus, which was an incorrect use of the word obviously, we meant the Green. I’ll meet you on campus. I’ll meet— you know, use it in that context. And it’s very interesting to see the evolution. And another thing that’s different: When you were in college and I was dating and stuff, the word “frat” was considered to be a state university word, and everyone looked down their nose at it, and they never under any conditions would use the word “frat,” meaning fraternity. And now it’s I think commonly used.

DONIN: So what did you call—oh, you called it a fraternity.

MARY: A fraternity. Or by the Greek name.
A Valley News blurb refers to plans “for a six-story addition just south of the main entrance” of DHMC, for research. Presumably this is the Williamson Translational Research Center.
A nice history of the building of the Ray School.
A new Maine Heraldry Blog is promising. Go moose-deer!
Rauner Library is allowing visitors to lick one of the books in its collection.
Thanks to Robert Goodby for citing the Notes toward a Catalog… in the 2006 Lebanon Slate Mill conservation study (pdf). Thanks for the citations to Halls, Tombs and Houses by Blake Gumprecht in The American College Town (UMass Press, 2010) and Carole Zellie in the University of Minnesota Greek Letter Chapter House Designation Study (2003). Glad the Review has adopted this site’s analysis of the new Inn addition.
Brilliant. Another post in praise of the aerial photo provided by Bing:

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[Update 11.04.2012: Beta photo link added.]

A remarkable discovery about the EBA’s building

Posted on 25.08.2012 by Regisseur

Frank Barrett’s book Early Dartmouth College and Downtown Hanover explains on page 110 that Charles Nash and Frank Tenney built the Inn Garage at 5 Allen Street in 1922. It is the gambrel-roofed building on the right, half way down Allen Street:

(An excellent view of the building appears on page 111 of the book, but that page is not in my Google Books preview. Page 111 is visible in Amazon‘s “Search inside This Book” — search for “Nash.”)

Barrett goes on to note this amazing fact: the old garage building is still there. In its heavily-modified present form, it houses EBA‘s on most of the ground level and one of the Bookstore’s several annexes on the second level:

The former garage at 5 Allen Street.

This is the new discovery: the original garage, now hidden under all that brick, was designed by Larson & Wells.¹The American Contractor 42:14 (2 April 1921), 67. Larson & Wells were the official campus architects during the two decades before WWII and designed Baker Library. While their many campus projects are well known, their utilitarian buildings remain obscure.

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[Update 05.12.2013: Broken link to EBAs replaced.]

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 [+]

References
↑1	The American Contractor 42:14 (2 April 1921), 67.

The West End and other topics

Posted on 17.08.2012 by Regisseur

Dartmouth Now has a post on the 75th anniversary of the Appalachian Trail, and The Dartmouth has an article.
The old through-truss bridge over the Connecticut at Lebanon is being replaced by the state highway department. The old and new bridges appear side-by-side in the Bing aerial.
The Hood has a page on the installation of the Kelly sculpture.
With little fanfare, the college/town-owned Hanover Water Company has been renamed the Trescott Water Company. Find some info at the Hanover Conservancy.
A beer garden at the Hop? (Newhampshire.com).
The owner of Jesse’s Restaurant on Route 120 is building a medical office building nearby (Valley News). Medical office buildings are popular: DHMC’s Heater Road Building had planning approval as private development when the hospital took over the project (DHMC has video about the architect and builder, several renderings, and other info).
Baker Library’s Reserve Corridor, now known as the Orozco Room, is being refurbished.
An old neighborhood in Hanover has developed what seems to be a new name, the West End. As far as one can tell from the web, this neighborhood occupies most of Hanover’s southwestern quarter, West of Main and south of Wheelock. The town is considering whether to designate the West End as a Heritage District (Planning Board minutes Jan. 24, 2012 pdf).
The college built a new chilled water plant next to the VAC (Bond info pdf, A-9).
Ore Koren ’12 created Dartmouth 1820s-1850s, an interesting collection documenting student life during the early nineteenth century.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Newhampshire.com removed; broken links to planning minutes and bond report fixed.]

Heraldry: The Tuck School and the Temple at Hephaestos

Posted on 13.08.2012 by Regisseur

I. The Geisel School. The big topic in Dartmouth heraldry is the Geisel School of Medicine’s new shield, mentioned here. It contains the familiar elements of the river, pine, founding date, and book, and it omits the depiction of the old Medical Building, which was demolished about 55 years ago. It deserves an analysis of its own.

II. The Graduate Studies Program. The Grad Studies shield seems to be receiving a big push, with a banner for Dartmouth Night (Grad Studies’ Flickr photostream) and the distribution of decals to students (Flickr).

The shield carries on what seem to be the unifying elements in Dartmouth’s armorial family: (1) the use of a founding date and (2) the placement of wavy lines in the base of the shield to represent the Connecticut River.

Here is how it looks in the group (published in March, shortly before the medical shield was replaced):

Shields representing Dartmouth and Associated Schools, from Vox the Vote.

The vertical year on the Grad Studies shield does not seem entirely successful in this rendition.

III. The Tuck School.

Graphically, the chunkiness of the Tuck shield, at the far right above, is appealing. It uses an extreme closeup view to cut off the building’s eaves, and its heavy line causes the shield border itself to read as part of the temple front. The Eighteenth-century letterforms are also nice and relate to Dartmouth’s seal, although they are not of the same 1990s (?) language as the rest of the Tuck shield.

The one thing that has always been disturbing about the Tuck shield is that it depicts a nonexistent building. It is not a stylized version of Tuck Hall’s portico; instead it represents a hexastyle Doric temple, like the temple at Hephaestos.

Temple at Hephaestos, from Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (1905) via Google Books.

Compare the row of six squat columns without capitals in Hephaestos to the Ionic portico of four relatively attenuated columns in Tuck Hall:

Tuck Hall temple front.

Shield with border removed and eaves extended, treating border as representing outer columns.

Alternatively, shield with border removed entirely to leave a quadristyle portico.

Perhaps this should not be irksome, since Dartmouth’s own shield depicts a nonexistent building as well. One way to resolve the problem would be for the Tuck School to build a hexastyle temple front somewhere on its campus.

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[Update 08.16.2012: Green temple-only illustrations added.]

The need for a new Alumni Hall

Posted on 27.07.2012 by Regisseur

The Hop expansion is going to take over the existing Alumni Hall as a performing-arts space. This makes sense: the big room is right there in the heart of things and seems to be underused.

Although Dartmouth has had an “alumni hall” only since 1962, the idea is worth continuing. In the Hop, the hall is a big multipurpose space that, although not as practical as Spaulding for alumni meetings, is distinguished from all other spaces by its decoration: it attempts to serve as a chamber of memory and sentiment. The Dartmouth Green walls display wooden recognition plaques and banners with the college seal and arms of the second earl of Dartmouth.

A new alumni hall should be a freestanding building; where should it be erected? The most prominent site is the vacant lot in front of Sherman, but that site should be reserved for a future library. What about the vacant lot north of Parkhurst, as an addition to Blunt Alumni Center? A major wing there could create a new and compatible faÃ§ade in the rhythm of Administration Row.

Projection on the Hop

Posted on 21.07.2012 by Regisseur

On October 12, artist Ross Ashton will project a work commissioned by Dartmouth onto the entrance facade of the Hop (The Dartmouth. Ashton seems to use heraldry a fair amount, and coats of arms or flags appear prominently in his projections on the Gibbs Building at King’s College, Cambridge (Flickr, Ashton’s blog), Buckingham Palace (Flickr), and Caerphilly Castle in Wales (ET Now).

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to projection notice replaced with link to The Dartmouth.]

History-based weirdness on a pair of pants

Posted on 17.07.2012 by Regisseur

The Co-op is advertising a pair of pants with the year 1763 on them.

That’s right, it’s the “Appropriation 250th Anniversary 1763 Dartmouth Banded Pant”:

New for the upcoming 2013 Dartmouth Co-op Apparel Season: Honoring the 250th Anniversary of New Hampshire Colonial Governor Benning Wentworth’s approval of a Â£50 appropriation and a promise of a tract of land in western New Hampshire for the purpose of Reverend Eleazar Wheelock to found a school to train missionaries for service among the native population, which would become our beloved Dartmouth College six years later. Celebrate the sestercentennial of this conception moment in Dartmouth College’s history. (Mayo, Lawrence Shaw. John Wentworth: Governor of New Hampshire, 1767-1775. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921. 104-105. Print.)

Although it is inspiring to see catalog copy citing its sources, this explanation is bewildering. One almost suspects that the Co-op found itself stuck with a shipment of misprinted pants and had to figure out how to unload them¦

The cited source provides on page 105:

The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock of Lebanon, Connecticut, after at least one failure, succeeded in interesting the governor in his school which trained missionaries, both white and red, for service among the Indians. How much Benning Wentworth cared about civilizing the savages is a question, but he approved an appropriation of Â£50 for this purpose in 1763, and offered Wheelock a tract of land for his school if he should choose to move it to western New Hampshire. This was encouraging to Wheelock, but he did not at once avail himself of the latter proposition because the continuance of his work depended largely upon funds which he hoped to raise in Great Britain.

The “school which trained missionaries” was Moor’s Charity School, and the text suggests that the appropriation was meant simply to support the operation of that existing school. Benning Wentworth obviously wanted Wheelock to move the school to New Hampshire, but the 1763 gift did not establish or even support Dartmouth College any more than did the ca. 1754 gift of Colonel Joshua More/Moor (or Wheelock’s early-1740s entry into the Latin School market). See, for example, Washington & Lee University, an 1813 college that evolved from a grammar school established about 20 miles away in 1749; it uses the 1749 date without hesitation (Wikipedia).

As the text goes on to state, Lord Dartmouth kicked off the fundraising with a 1767 gift that, although directed at the charity school, actually would be used to establish the college. Benning Wentworth’s nephew John succeeded him as the colonial governor and granted the college a charter in December of 1769. On July 5, 1770, Wheelock selected Hanover as the site of the school.

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[Update 08.12.2012: Minor wording change in final paragraph.]

Amending Dartmouth’s 1769 Charter

Posted on 15.07.2012 by Regisseur

I. The 2010 Amendment. The “official” online version of Dartmouth’s charter used to be an html version provided by the Government Documents office. Recently, the Trustees have made available a June 2010 revision (pdf) with helpful side- and footnotes. (Some indication of authorship for the notations would be nice, since most are many decades old.)

The reason for the revision is found in footnote 8 on page 9:

By vote taken June 11, 2010, the charter was amended to add the following provision required by the Internal Revenue Service’s regulations concerning tax-exempt organizations: “Upon the dissolution of the Corporation, its assets shall be distributed for one or more exempt purposes within the meaning of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, or corresponding section of any future federal tax code, or shall be distributed to the federal government, or to a state or local government for a public purpose. Any such assets not disposed of shall be disposed of by the Superior Court of the county in which the principal office of the Corporation is then located, exclusively for such purposes or to such organization or organizations, as said Court shall determine, which are organized and operated exclusively for such purposes.”

II. The description of the 2007 amendment. The notes do not quote the 2007 amendment that expanded the board, and the description of that amendment remains a curiosity. The October 2007 version of the Charter explained the amendment this way:

By vote taken September 8, 2007, the charter was amended to increase the number of Trustees to twenty-six, provided that the number of Trustees to be elected upon nomination by the alumni shall be eight, and that the Governor ex-officio and the President during his or her term of service shall continue to be Trustees.

As pointed out here, that note suggested that the Charter itself (rather than the board’s resolutions or bylaws) had been amended to describe the system of nominations. If that is what happened, it would be notable as probably the first time that nominations (or for that matter alumni) were ever mentioned in the Charter. One would assume that the traditional practice up to this time was to amend the Charter to increase the number of Trustees and, at the same time, to amend the bylaws to increase the number of nominations.

The explanatory note has changed in the latest version of the Charter. On page 4 (the continuation of footnote 2), the 2010 Charter states:

By vote taken September 8, 2007, the charter was amended to increase the number of Trustees to twenty-six, provided that the number of Trustees to be elected by the Board upon nomination by the Board shall be sixteen, that the number of Trustees to be elected upon nomination by the alumni shall be eight, and that the Governor ex-officio and the President during his or her term of service shall continue to be Trustees.

(Emphasis added). The amendment has not changed, only the board’s description of it. Things would be clearer if the board put the text of the amendment itself into the footnotes. Or, if the speculation is correct that “alumni” is not in the Charter, the board could clarify matters by describing its actions with somewhat more precision.

Inn updates, the story of Bean’s Art Store, and other notes

Posted on 13.06.2012 by Regisseur

The Dartmouth has a story on Bean’s Art Store, the little shop near the Hop (behind Ledyard National Bank) that has been furnishing Studio Art students with their squishy erasers and tubes of paint for decades.
Dartbeat has a post with photos on the progress at the Visual Arts Center. Big Green Alert Blog notes that the power lines along Lebanon Street are going under ground.
The Boston Globe links to a Valley News story on the completion of a large part of the Inn renovations (see also Dartmouth Now. The Rauner Library Blog has a post on the Inn’s predecessors on the site.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that the Interior Department has designated the Connecticut River and its watershed the first National Blueway in the country. The Valley News reports on the septennial perambulation of the riverine New Hampshire-Vermont border by the two states’ attorneys general.
The Valley News reports (again) that the Friends of Hanover Crew now have permission to build a rowing dock at Wilson’s Landing, a part of Fullington Farm. Hanover’s crews plan to move their boats out of Dartmouth’s boathouse and into a new boathouse to be built at the farm. An interesting report (pdf) from Engineering Ventures mentions that when the Friends of Hanover Crew bought their 2.4-acre portion of the farm from Dartmouth in 2008, they promised to allow Ledyard Canoe Club members to store 20 canoes and kayaks on the site, probably in the basement of the existing barn.

Dartmouth Sports announced some time ago that the new basketball office suite was completed in the old Kresge gym space in Berry Sports Center (via Dartmouth Now).
Thanks to Bruce for his proposal that as part of a Piazza Nervi project, the entrance to Thompson Arena should be redone (Big Green Alert Blog). This is a good idea, since Thompson’s entrance definitely needs replacing. But while one does notice that Thompson’s front facade is not parallel to Leverone’s, the lack of alignment is not necessarily a problem: plenty of urban spaces, especially in Italy, lack any right angles at all. And if the facades were made parallel, the difference in heights might become more noticeable. Who knows… The 2000 student life master plan (pdf) notes that the entry into Thompson Arena is obscured by existing houses along Park Street:

There are, however, opportunities to reinforce the entry to Thompson Arena by moving or demolishing the College-owned houses on Park Street in front of the current entry. Doing so would relate the Arena to its cousin, Leverone Field House, both designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, and complete an intention planned but never realized.
The school’s Flickr page has a photo set showing the new ’53 Commons renovation of Thayer Dining Hall. The photos, along with plans, show that the red awnings in the main dining room have been removed and the bays opened up to allow free passage from north to south. Upstairs is where the real changes have taken place: there are lots of dining rooms up there now. The long, narrow Topside space is a dining room; the space above the leather-paneled Tindle Lounge/Paganucci Room is a private dining room; the spaces above the lobby (formerly offices?) look to be dining or meeting rooms. It is not clear where they put all the DDS offices that used to occupy the second level. At least some of the quadripylons out front were removed for the project (Street View): will they be replaced? Some kind of bollard seems necessary there, but the area might be more interesting with a different solution.
The 1994-era Lone Pine Tavern in the basement of Collis has been replaced by something called One Wheelock. It seems that a change in focus was needed, but did the room really have to be stripped bare? Perhaps people were stealing the memorabilia.
The Rauner Library blog has had too many interesting posts to count. See posts on the mathematics funerals and duckboards on the Green.
Dartmouth Health Connect opened a while back (The Dartmouth). It occupies the former Omer & Bob’s location following a renovation by Haynes & Garthwaite. It turns out that H&G designed Omer & Bob’s new location in Lebanon.
Lebanon is selling its Junior High School building, designed by Jens Larson (Valley News, Valley News). Note the similarities to Baker Library:

Some interesting things going on at other colleges: Yale is building a freestanding college in Singapore, designed by KieranTimberlake (Times article on the controversy). The University of Virginia is building a facility for its squash team at the Boar’s Head Sports Club, part of a fancy private resort (UVaToday). The Boar’s Head Inn is owned by the U.Va. Real Estate Foundation.
That Hanover war memorial that stands in front of the Town Building on Main Street? (Street View.) It was previously associated with the Green, where one would expect a war memorial, and shows up in front of the Inn in an old photo that was published in a recent story in the Mirror. It is interesting to note that a nearby space, just to the east of the Inn, later became a war memorial garden for the college.
“Chaste” might not be the right word, but “tasteful” is close: TruexCullins’ Buchanan Hall addition is very nice (Street View, school project page).
The Rauner Blog’s post on the Ski Jump features this photo of the jump’s outrun. The jump is gone now, but the Golf Course remains. Does that view show the same site as this one, from the Hanover Country Club’s map of the various holes? More historic images of the jump at Skisprungschanzen.com (via Big Green Alert Blog).
More information on the bypass mentioned here earlier, from page 14 of the 2002 Campus Master Plan (pdf):

To reduce congestion, Hanover has explored alternatives to bypass the Inn corner. A Connector Highway linking Route 120, Route 10 and I-91 would be very desirable for both Hanover and the Medical Center, but Lebanon has not supported this proposal. The College should continue to study this and other by-pass proposals, making College properties available if necessary.

The next Visual Arts Center

Posted on 11.06.2012 by Regisseur

I. Introduction

The nearing completion of the Visual Arts Center points up the current underuse of the site next door at the corner of Crosby and Lebanon Streets.

Existing conditions. All maps based on official campus map (pdf).

This is a large and important site. Whatever building goes here — let’s assume it is an arts-related building — will be visible to visitors arriving on Lebanon Street. It will need to be a gateway building, as the 2000 downtown Hanover plan illustrates so thoroughly. The Rogers Marvel 2002 Arts Center Analysis (pdf) also emphasizes the potential of this site on page 38.

author photo of Crosby and Lebanon Streets, 2006

View to the northwest showing the corner, 2006.

The first impulse is to follow the footprint of the existing low-scale facilities building. But this site is not only large, it is also unusually malleable. The college and town might be able to relocate Crosby Street in radical ways to completely reshape the ground available for the gateway building.

Why might Crosby be changeable? Because it has been changed in the past. Crosby Street was first laid out in 1872, to separate the state farm on the east from the state college dormitory site and other buildings on the west.

Crosby Street originally ran straight through to Lebanon Street. It was not until the early 1960s that Crosby’s southern delta was given its current incongruously suburban form. When Dartmouth sought permission to close down South College Street for the Hopkins Center, the Town asked Dartmouth to rework Crosby Street in return, aligning the street with Sanborn Road to form an ex post facto four-way intersection.

View to the north showing the front (west) facade of Memorial Field, 2006. The sidewalk preserves Crosby’s original alignment.

Should we worry about Sanborn Road if Crosby is realigned? No. In fact, the downtown Hanover plan proposes in text and an illustration that Sanborn Road be blocked off. Instead, Hovey Lane will give access to this neighborhood through a short outlet punched through to South Street (see map below).

Would the abandonment of Crosby Street’s current alignment open up any possibilities for a college building on the corner? Each of the following proposals assumes that McKenzie Hall/Shops on Crosby is preserved; Sanborn Road is rerouted; and commercial buildings are built on the college land along the south side of Lebanon Street.

II. The Maximum Arts

The gateway building could expand to fill all of the empty land added to the corner:

The maximum arts proposal.

This plan would block an important view of Memorial Field and make Crosby Street into a narrow tunnel. A good use of space, but not good preservation or townscape.

Some variation on this plan, however, might be a good one:

Variation on the maximum arts proposal.

III. The Minimum Arts

Crosby could be pulled to the west, adding a big empty lawn in front of Memorial Field:

The minimum arts proposal.

This plan would not make efficient use of space, and its creation of new lawns would not actually improve the view of Memorial Field.

IV. The Square and Temple

A big public square could be carved out of the surrounding buildings:

The square and temple proposal.

If the big square feels barren, a little temple that shares an alignment with nothing else could be dropped down in front of Memorial Field.

This plan would take advantage of the interesting fact that both Memorial Field and St. Denis Roman Catholic Church were designed in the early 1920s by Jens F. Larson. The two buildings appear to be perpendicular to each other, both aligned with Crosby Street.

View to the southeast showing north (front) and west facades of St. Denis, 2006.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Memorial Field image fixed.]

How “historic” is the Inn?

Posted on 07.05.2012 by Regisseur

The publicity around the Inn expansion constantly emphasizes the building’s “historic” nature. The label seems to come from the Inn’s inclusion in 2011 in the Historic Hotels of America, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

How does a hotel get into the program?

To be nominated and selected for membership into this prestigious program, a hotel must be at least 50 years old, listed in or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or recognized as having historic significance.

The nomination form states that “Properties must be a minimum age of 75 years” under the blank for “Year originally built.”

The main block of the Inn will not be 50 years old until 2016. The Inn is not listed on the National Register, and one doubts that any historian has determined the building to be eligible for listing. (If the dates on the main block and the subsidiary wing were swapped, that would be another story.) Nor does anyone, including the National Trust, appear to have recognized the Inn as having historic significance. The phrase “historic significance” refers to the fact that the building was “home to, or on the grounds of, a former home of famous persons or [a] significant location for an event in history.” This HHA definition is in line with one of the criteria for National Register eligibility.

What, then, did the Inn tell the National Trust in its application? Some clues might lie in the text of the HHA page provided for the Inn:

General Ebenezer Brewster, whose home occupied the present site of the Inn, founded the Dartmouth Hotel in 1780 but later [it] burned to the ground and was replaced two years later on the same site by the Wheelock Hotel.

As corrected, this sentence is adequate as an anecdote, although it makes one wonder who would care about something occurring “two years later” than an unspecified date.

To be a bit more accurate, the page might say that the inn established by Brewster was usually called Brewster’s Tavern. Around 1813, Brewster’s son replaced the building with a completely different building called the Dartmouth Hotel. That building burned in 1887 and was replaced in 1889 with a completely different building called the Wheelock Hotel. That building was demolished in the 1960s and is no longer standing:

Emil Rueb photo of Inn demolition, from the Flickr photostream of the Town of Hanover, N.H.

Mid-1960s photo by Emil Rueb of the demolition of the 1889 Inn, with the surviving 1924 wing visible in the background. Image from the Flickr photostream of the Town of Hanover, N.H. (where it is courtesy of Dena Romero).

To continue:

From 1901-1903, Dartmouth College carried out extensive renovations to the facility, which was then renamed the Hanover Inn.

This sentence could be worded better, but it is correct. What is not clear is why anyone would care about those renovations, since the renovated building no longer exists.

An east wing was added in 1924, followed in 1939 by an exterior expansion.

And that east wing is the oldest part of the Inn. The 1939 information is interesting but irrelevant.

In 1968 a west wing was added.

Another, more accurate way to put it would be to say that “in 1968, the historic 1889 Hanover Inn was completely demolished, leaving only the 1924 east wing.” The main block of the Inn today, the building standing on the corner, is not “a west wing” attached to something greater than itself: it is the Inn.

Before Dartmouth College became co-ed, the fourth floor of the Hanover Inn was a single women’s dormitory. The Inn provided chaperones for the single female guests.

These statements probably have some basis in fact. First, if the school was yet not co-ed, why were women living in a dormitory? Because they were Carnival visitors, in town for a few days each year. Second, if they were college-aged, why bother describing them (twice) as “single”? It cannot be meant to distinguish them from the veterans’ wives living in married students’ housing after WWII, since those women were not segregated by gender. Third, the statement about the chaperones is interesting, if true. But considering that Carnival dates at the Inn were not staying in a temporarily-cleared dormitory, and thus were paying for their rooms, the Inn must have found it cost-effective to station a few women in the halls to mind the furnishings.

The Hanover Inn is the oldest continuous[ly-operated] business in the state of New Hampshire.

That might be true, if the various hotels dating back to Brewster are considered as a single business. One might prefer Tuttle Farm, which has been operating since 1632 and apparently has been owned by just one family.

—————–

[Update 07.14.2012: The Inn is now accurately emphasizing the fact that a hostel has existed on the site since 1780. See for example Dartmouth Now.]

A further update on the Inn addition

Posted on 28.04.2012 by Regisseur

The Valley News reports that the project’s first phase will finish by June, “even as the price of the project has skyrocketed and town officials say the college may have underestimated the scope of the work.” Google’s Street View sort of shows where the addition is going. The Town’s Flickr stream has a mid-1960s photo that shows a clean Scout driving in the foreground and the original 1880s Inn being demolished in the background. The Inn’s 1923 wing, also visible, still stands.

Images of selective demolition are on line from contractor Dectam, including photos of some guest rooms without walls, only bathtubs; a team of workers going after the exterior concrete pavers; and the demolition of the lobby plaza area wall.

Dana Lowe, a subcontractor on the project, died on March 13th after a construction accident involving a crane and a scissor-lift (The Dartmouth).

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Dectam replaced.]

The Inn’s new conference center to be named for John Minary

Posted on 26.04.2012 by Regisseur

From the April 23 press release (pdf):

November 2012: The Minary Conference Center opens, encompassing a grand ballroom with 3,933 square feet of meeting and event space capable of accommodating up to 330 people. The area also includes three executive meeting rooms.

The previous Minary Center was a 1928 house on Squam Lake that William S. Paley gave the college in 1970 honor of John Minary ’29. The college used it as a conference center until it sold the property in 2010.

Further details of the Inn’s novel features:

The November grand opening will introduce a new fitness center for Inn guests, 14 additional guest rooms including an oversized suite overlooking Main Street, for a total of 108 rooms. The Inn’s new signature restaurant, currently being designed by one of New England’s best-known chefs, will open, serving lunch and dinner in a prime location — at the corner of Main and Wheelock Streets. The smaller dining space will transition to serving breakfast only and will be available as additional reception space and for private events following the opening of the larger restaurant.

Dartmouth sells its CRREL land to the Army after 50 years of subsidies

Posted on 24.04.2012 by Regisseur

The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory on Lyme Road is not only the state’s largest industrial facility, it also represents the U.S. Army’s only presence in New Hampshire.

For the last half-century, Dartmouth has owned most of the land underlying the laboratory, and the Corps of Engineers has paid essentially nothing to use it. Now that the original $1 lease signed in 1962 has ended (The Dartmouth), the college has decided to sell the property to the Corps for $18.6m (Valley News).

A Google Maps view of the CRREL property, with the golf course at lower left and Dartmouth’s once-and-future Rivercrest housing development at top.

Finances aside, the loss of control over this property creates a danger that some unappealing future development could move in if CRREL were to leave: one presumes that Dartmouth has retained a right of first refusal for any future sale. At least this sale removes a potential site on which the Tuck School could (obviously unwisely) build a new campus.

Renaming the Medical School

Posted on 04.04.2012 by Regisseur

Dartmouth has changed the name of its medical school¹Inspired by a recent article in Businessweek on the cost of naming rights for business schools, this morning I jotted down the idea for a post on Dartmouth’s offer of naming rights for its medical school, an offer previously noted here in 2005. It was not ten minutes later that I received the announcement, presumably held for release until after April Fool’s Day, that Dartmouth had named its medical school after Dr. Seuss. from the Dartmouth Medical School to the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Dr. Seuss, as Dartmouth’s most famous “doctor” [of philosophy], would seem to be as good a namesake as any.

Now the medical school fits the pattern established by Dartmouth’s two later professional schools. The current names of the three institutions seem to be:

The Tuck School (the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College)
Thayer School (the Thayer School of Engineering)
The Geisel School (the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth).

The Medical School has a long tradition of changing its name, and it sometimes goes by several names at once. An 1897 note titled “Name of the School” reads:

The name of the Medical Department seems to have changed several times. In 1806 the broadside list of students is headed: “Catalogue of the Medical Students and Students of College who attended the Medical Lectures at Dartmouth University” (as far back as Sept. 20, 1782, the Trustees passed a resolution styling the College a University); that of 1811, “Catalogue of the Dartmouth Medical Theatre;” that of 1814, “Catalogue of the Medical Institution at Dartmouth University;” that of 1817, “Catalogue of the Dartmouth Medical Institution.” At some time between this date and 1824 the name “New Hampshire Medical Institution” began to be used and was retained until 1880 though the official title has always been the “Medical Department of Dartmouth College.”²Phineas S. Conner, Historical Address, in “Dartmouth Medical College Centennial Exercises” (1897), 27.

The name “the Medical Department,” which is not explained by the note, was in use at least by 1812.³Dartmouth Trustees meeting minutes (1812), quoted in Conner, 57. Other examples include “the Medical College” (1871,⁴Medical faculty meeting minutes (1871), quoted in Conner, 61. 1880,⁵Oliver P. Hubbard, The Early History of the New Hampshire Medical Institution (Washington, D.C.: Oliver P. Hubbard, 1880), 37. 1883⁶Medical faculty meeting minutes (1883), quoted in Conner, 61.), “the Dartmouth Medical College” (1868,⁷Medical faculty meeting minutes (1868), quoted in Conner, 56. 1895,⁸Dartmouth medical faculty meeting minutes (1895), quoted in Conner, 46. 1897⁹Conner, 22.), “the Medical School of New Hampshire” (1893¹⁰Petition of New Hampshire Medical Society (1893), quoted in Conner, 33.), “the Medical Institution at Hanover” (1893¹¹Petition (1893), quoted in Conner, 33.), “the Medical School” (1809¹²New Hampshire Legislature (1809), quoted in Conner, 29. Note that the school’s 1811 building, depicted on the old shield above, was itself initially called “the Medical School.”), and of course “the Dartmouth Medical School” (1880,¹³”From Abroad,” Medical Times and Gazette (11 December 1880), 660. 1897,¹⁴Conner, 17, 23.).

This would seem to be a good time to change the 1950s (?) shield again,¹⁵Jonathan Good has pointed out that the shield’s original Indian-head cane, shown above, was replaced by a conventional staff of Aesculapius during or before 2010. and it looks as if the school has already thought of that.

A pre-2010 version of the DMS shield, and the 2012 GSM shield

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[Update 04.05.2012: Caduceus corrected to Aesculapius.]

[Update 04.19.2012: Suppositional name “The Geisel School of Medicine” shortened to “The Geisel School.”]