Doin' the Raccoon

With the approach of 2018, we hope that you have plans to spend New Year's Eve in style, whether that be out on the town enjoying music, the company of friends, parties, or simply bundling up and and staying cozy at home with a good book and a nice drink. It can get cold up here in Hanover during the winters and, whenever the snow begins to come down outside Rauner's windows, we can't help but think of what it must have been like to weather a New England winter as a Dartmouth student back before efficient heating and double-paned windows were the norm. For Dartmouth students in the 1920s, part of a comprehensive strategy for staying warm was likely the purchase of a raccoon coat.

Raccoon coats were full-length fur coats that became a fashion craze on college campuses during the heyday of the Jazz Age, much like the ubiquitous Canada Goose parkas that so many Dartmouth denizens seem to sport nowadays. Like those parkas, raccoon coats were also quite an investment and could cost anywhere from $350 to $900 or more, depending upon the quality of the coat. To put that price in context, the cost of annual tuition at Dartmouth during the late 1920s was $400. Still, they were a must-have item for aspirational college men. The popularity of the fad, especially among elite institutions, is underscored by the lyrics of a 1928 song, Doin' the Raccoon: "Oh they wear them down at Princeton and they share them up at Yale; Oh they eat in them at Harvard and they sleep in them in jail."

Dartmouth students, although not fortunate enough to be name-dropped in a hit song of the era, nonetheless diligently bowed to the demands of fashion. The Dartmouth student newspaper was filled with advertisements for raccoon coats (as well as baby seal and bear fur coats!) and, during Winter Carnival, the train platform was often swarmed by fur clad Dartmouth men eagerly awaiting the arrival of their dates to the party. We won't speculate as to the other strategies that students employed to keep warm during the Roaring Twenties, but it's clear that wearing raccoon was a non-negotiable.

To explore the issues of the Dartmouth student newspaper from the 1920s, come to the reading room and pull them off the shelf. To see the full lyrics and music to Doin' the Raccoon, ask for Sheet Music SM 1567. To explore the various Winter Carnival photographs in the archives, search the Dartmouth College Photo Files database or ask to see them in person in the reading room.

Winter Scenes

We hope this gets you into the spirit of the season! brought to you by the inventor of the modern Christmas card, Louis Prang, his "Winter Scenes" series of chromolithograph cards from the 1860s. Color printing was a novelty at the time, and Prang had introduced the new technology to America. He issued dozens of sets of cards to satisfy public demand.

There are twelve cards in this series, all lovingly mounted by a 19th-century collector in an album containing over 450 Prang cards. There are series devoted to fall leaves, wildflowers, wood ferns and mosses, as well as aphorisms and exotic places from around the world.

To see it, ask for Iconography 1722.

Spotlighting Satan

If you were a book illustrator faced with creating the first illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost, where would you focus? Let's face it, at least in the early parts of the poem, Satan is the most compelling character, and he's certainly the most fun to draw. It's no surprise, then, that he gets top billing in Jacob Tonson's lavish 1688 printing of Paradise Lost.


Not that we are feeling any cynicism about Christmas or anything, but it seemed like a good time to give him a moment in the sun...

Tonson's beautiful edition is waiting for you. Just ask for Rare PR3560 1688.

Rich in Stones

Last week, we brought you an 1890 plea to farmers to stay in New Hampshire. The lure of the rich soil of the Midwest was proving too strong, and land prices in New Hampshire were suffering. Skip forward fifty-odd years, and here we have a kind of admission of defeat in the first appearance of Robert Frost's poem, "Rich in Stones," in the 1942 Old Farmer's Almanac. Frost, an on-again, off-again New England farmer, knew what he was writing about. The short poem is narrated by an old New England farmer:

I farm a pasture where the boulders lie
As touching as a basket full of egg

It is addressed to one who has moved away to more fertile fields in the west:

In wind-soil to a depth of thirty feet.
And every acre good enough to eat

Then the narrator fantasizes about shipping a largish stone west to "set up like a statue in your yard." There it would stand as

"The portrait of the soul of my Gransir Ira.
It came from where he came from anyway."

There is a certain crustiness to the poem that captures the spirit of Yankee farmers too stubborn to head west, but also an acknowledgement  of the futility of staying behind.

This is part of our Robert Frost First Appearances collection that is incorporated into our Robert Frost Collection. You can ask for it by requesting MS-1178, Box 32, Folder 71.

On Crime and Punishment

Amelia Buell was born on May 25, 1856, in Lisbon, New Hampshire. She was the daughter of George Hansen Buell and Cordelia Thayer. On November 25, 1865, she was committed to the New Hampshire House of Reformation in Manchester, NH. The charge – fornication. Amelia was nine years old.

Amelia is only one of the names listed in the "Register of Inmates of the House of Reformation Compiled to Jan. 1868." Ranging in age from eight to sixteen, many of the juveniles were incarcerated for such infractions as truancy, lewdness, vagrancy and stubbornness. The latter infraction dated back to a law known as the "Stubborn Child Law" which was first enacted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1641.  Even though the law was no longer prosecuted to its fullest extent (which in the 17th century often led to the child's death), the fact that it was still used by the 19th century speaks volumes about the status of children, who until the late 19th century, were still prosecuted as adults. Reform schools, like the one in Manchester, were established to provide a way to separate juvenile offenders and their "crimes" from those of adults. There was strict discipline and education, but also institutional abuse.

The Manchester institution was built in 1857, on land that was once the home of Gen. John Stark, and opened in 1858 as "a house of reformation for juvenile and female offenders against the law." Most of the inmates were boys. The few girls that were incarcerated there were held on charges of prostitution.

The register also contains more serious offenses such as stealing, assault, barn burning and breaking and entering with the offenders coming from all over the state of New Hampshire. Punishment ranged from one to seven years. Amelia was sentenced to six years. She was  released on December 11, 1869.

To take a look at the register please ask for Codex 003352 (there isn't a catalog record for this quite yet, but we will link to it when it is ready).

The Strangest Army Post...

Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day and, while going through a box of President Ernest Hopkins's presidential papers, we stumbled quite by chance on a curious artifact of World War II--a 1943 letter from Ted Geisel '25 (aka Dr. Seuss), to Hopkins thanking him for the letter of recommendation that got him into the armed forces. As Geisel put it, it was so good it got him into the Army and the Navy!

Geisel explains that he is "now out on what is probably the strangest army post in the country... the old Fox Studio, where under Colonel Frank Capra I am assisting in the writing of 'Orientation Films.'" As an indication of how much Geisel had to rough it in the Army, the letter is on the stationery of the Castle Argyle apartments in Hollywood.

In typical Hopkins fashion, the president replied with a two-page, single-spaced letter advising Geisel on important themes his films could explore.

To see the letters, ask for DP-11, Box 7043, Folder 11. For more, we have another example of Geisel's Army work: This is Ann.

Farmland Security

 New Hampshire was never a friendly place for farmers, who had to scratch out a living in the state's rocky soil. Even nearby Vermont's soil was leaps and bounds above the Granite State's in terms of fertility and lack of physical obstructions. During the nineteenth century, with the rise of textile mills along the New England rivers and the settlement of the west, New Hampshire saw a marked increase in the abandonment of traditional farms. Entire families picked up and moved to the cities and places like Illinois and Ohio, where the land was plentiful and rich; we've blogged before about the publication of pamphlets meant to entice farmers to flee the barren ground of the northeast for the lush fields of Iowa.

By the late-19th century, the rate of abandonment had become so great that the New Hampshire state legislature passed an act in 1889 that required the office of the Commissioner of Agriculture and Immigration to investigate the state of these farms. They then published a report of their investigation, complete with a color map, entitled Secure a Home in New Hampshire, Where Comfort, Health, and Prosperity Abound. As one can guess, the book was intended "to call public attention to the desirable farms which for various reasons have become without occupants," so that the farms could be repopulated and hopefully stimulate the state economy. The overall tone of the publication can best be described as strained optimism, wherein the authors try to portray the best picture possible of the state's agricultural situation while acknowledging the factors that caused mass migration in the first place. The pamphlet claims that new farming innovations with regard to crops and livestock, among them fruit and dairy, have made farms in New Hampshire more profitable than ever. There is also an emphasis on an expanding infrastructure made possible by the railroads as well as an uptick in summer tourism that brings money into the state during the warm seasons.

Still, despite this cheery prognosis, the fact remains that there were hundreds of abandoned properties in New Hampshire. The book's introduction attempts to address the elephant in the room directly:

"Doubtless the question arises, why are these farms vacated when circumstances seem so favorable to their occupancy?" Many possible reasons are provided, all of which provide alternatives to the inferiority of the local soil: extravagant habits of the owner; the attraction of the society of city life; even that the previous owner has become so wealthy that they have invested in a larger, even more successful business elsewhere. Regardless of how fantastical the explanations may be, or how desirable the properties are presented, it's still a hard sell; thumbing through hundreds of descriptions of deserted farms doesn't leave one with an impression of prosperity but, rather, desperation.

To see whose farm was up for sale in your town or county, come to Rauner and ask to see NH Imprints M35 1890.