Architecture topics in the Upper Valley

  • 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 Alumni Magazine on architecture

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.


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.]

Publications, including a 1954 Carnival film

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

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

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.

Varied topics in history and architecture

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

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

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.

John Ledyard a hot topic

Why so many Ledyard books recently?

A review I haven’t read in JAH compares them.

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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to JAH review replaced.]

Researching the architectural history of New York

While the Office for Metropolitan History has — fabulously — made Manhattan new building application information available through a database covering the years from 1900 to 1986, the nineteenth century permits represent a larger project that is yet to be undertaken.

It turns out that the Internet Archive is hosting scanned and searchable copies of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from 1879 to 1922, each reporting new buildings, alterations, purchases, mortgages, and other transactions in detail. Searching for this journal returns a list of volumes available in pdf and other formats. The one unnumbered volume is 73 (1904), and volumes 26, 28, 30, 38, and 46 appear to be unavailable. Of those, volume 28 (second half of 1881) is available from Google Books.

Google Books also has volumes 5-6 (1870), 7-8 (1871), and 9-10 (1872).

A new list of about 675 Lamb & Rich projects should be available here in the next few weeks.

[Update 12.07.2009: It is more like 600 projects, and it is available at Lamb & Rich.]

[Update 02.14.2010: Reference to volumes 5-10 added.]

[Update 04.12.2010: Another good way to search the Record & Guide is to put this into Google:
site:www.columbia.edu “firm name”.]

Five unrelated topics

The Northeast Chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills has acquired some old textile machinery and hopes to restart a mill in Claremont (Valley News).

The short-term Memorial Field renovation is finishing and football has started (Valley News, Big Green Alert Blog).

Computers can compile multiple photographs of a single building into a three-dimensional model of that building; a lab at the University of Washington is using the millions of photos people have posted to Flickr to reconstruct entire cities (story at physorg.com). The lab has examples of several European monuments.

[Update 04.12.2010: The New York Times has a story on the “Rome in a Day” project that mentions the PhotoCity game.]

The Tuck School has started a Leadership Center (news release), and the Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (“the Dartmouth Institute”) is now being cited alongside Tuck, Thayer, and DMS as a graduate or research institution (Irene M. Wielawski, “Taking Charge,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Sept./Oct. 2009), reprinted at Speaking of Dartmouth). The Dartmouth Institute was founded in 1988 and began its first degree-granting program in 2003.

The planning office has posted a presentation on parking [pdf], more interesting than you’d expect, and the College Planner has noted [Google cached version] that Dartmouth has maintained parking rates for a quarter-century.

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[Update 09.18.2016: Broken link to planner post replaced.]
[Update 07.06.2013: Broken link to PhotoCity game removed.]

Various publications

An aerial film made for promotional purposes shows the campus nicely.

An oral history of Dartmouth in World War II is available from the archives.

UPNE has published The Great River about the Connecticut River (UPNE, Valley News).

A photograph from this website showing Yale’s Book & Snake temple is the frontispiece in Stephen White’s new novel The Siege, set at Yale University.

Edward Connery Lathem, 1926-2009

Former Librarian of the College and Dean of Libraries Edward Connery Lathem of the Class of 1951 died on May 15th (Vox). I never got the opportunity to meet him, but I remember seeing him working in Rauner and noticing the respect he received from everyone.

Since 1983, according to Vox, Lathem also held the title of Usher of Dartmouth College, one of the offices established by the Charter but not filled at the time or at any time people could remember. Lathem also revived the office of Steward at the time. One hopes the Board will consider appointing a new Usher to succeed Lathem, and a new Steward if that office is not occupied.