Among the Clouds

Now that the Fourth of July has passed, it is time to think about heading for higher ground to escape the summer heat. If it were 1881, you might hop on a special train out of Boston and head for the White Mountains. Included in our large collection of material related to the White Mountains is Among the Clouds, a regular newspaper published "During the Season" from the summit of Mount Washington. It provided news of the comings and goings of tourists, updates on good scenery, and of course, the weather report.

This issue from July 13 was only the second of the season for 1881. It was clear and cool with a high temperature of 57, and the paper reported that the snow banks were still particularly large on Mount Washington. But it was more than just the cool weather that delighted:

The full moon shone down upon the low hanging clouds last evening which fills Pinkham Notch and the valley of Saco. It was a beautiful sight and brought back to recollection the many similar views that we have witnessed here before. The clear, limitless view of mid-day bears no comparison with that of Monday evening. The rugged outlines were softened, and one seemed to be almost in fairy land.

Ask for White Mountains F41.1 .A56 to learn more about 19th-century tourist life in the White Mountains.

Happy Birthday Hanover!

With the fall of Montreal to the British in September 1760, most of the continental fighting of the French and Indian War came to an end. Attention then turned to the peaceful settlement of northern New England. During his term of office, Royal Governor of New Hampshire Benning Wentworth granted over 140 town charters within the territory under his control, 78 of them in 1761 alone. Among these were the charters for several Upper Valley towns, on both sides of the Connecticut River, granted that summer.

In December of 1760, Edmund Freeman and Joseph Storrs had petitioned Govenor Wentworth for a grant, specifying land at the mouth of the Wells River, a particularly choice location in the beautiful and fertile Connecticut River valley. What Freeman, Storrs and their fellow proprietors received was the July 4, 1761, charter for the town of Hannover. The first settlers arrived in 1765, and by the time of a provincial census in 1767, the town had 92 residents.

The proprietors of Hanover were aware that the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock intended to establish his college in New Hampshire. To encourage his selection of Hanover as the site, they offered Wheelock large tracts of land, for support of the school and for himself personally. In August 1770, Wheelock, his family and a handful of students arrived on the Hanover plain to start the work of Dartmouth College.

The Library's latest exhibit, By His Excellency's Command, celebrates Hanover's 250th birthday. It will be on display in Baker Library Main Hall through August 31st.

Did you know that Dartmouth College has its own cemetery?

Nestled between the Thayer School of Engineering complex and Fairbanks are 12 acres of land, the first acre of which was confirmed by the trustees as “a burying ground for the use of this College and the inhabitants of this vicinity,” in 1771. Given to the trustees by Eleazar Wheelock, it is the final resting place of eight college presidents, numerous trustees and treasurers as well as professors, students, town officials and other important members of the community. However, Eleazar Wheelock was not the first to be buried there. That honor belongs to his stepson Rev. John Maltby who died on Sept 30, 1771 at the age of forty-five of fever.

Dartmouth Cemetery Association
"Deaths on Hanover Plain"

In 1845 the Dartmouth Cemetery Association was formed and charged with improving and extending the existing grounds. As a result, roads were developed and terraces were built into the sides of deep ravines, which split the grounds into two large parcels, formerly connected by a footbridge. However, as funding for the Association dried up, the bridge, which over time had become unsafe for use, was taken down and never replaced. The lack of adequate finances also contributed to the disbursement of the Association in 1943, and the cemetery was deeded to the Town of Hanover which continues to be responsible for its upkeep.

William Dewey's "List of Deaths.."

In 1898 Dartmouth freshman Arthur H. Chivers took a stroll through the cemetery, which left such an impression on him that fifty years later, when he was a Professor of Biology at the college and a Selectman of the Town of Hanover, he undertook to update the existing charts of the cemetery made in 1862 and 1911. Utilizing William Worthington Dewey’s journal and his own observations, he prepared a new card index of all known burials in the cemetery, reading and recording the inscriptions on each stone. In addition he created diagrams of each lot showing the relative position of every monument, stone and marker in the “Old” Dartmouth Cemetery. Completed in 1950, his six-volume record was presented to the College Archives in 1963.

To see Chiver’s records ask for DH-38. William Worthington Dewey’s “List of deaths in the vicinity of Dartmouth College, including likewise the Hamlet usually called Greensborough, From AD 1769 to the last Date on the Register [1859]” is located in Vault 4.

Your House

One of my favorite books in the collection is only five years old and contains just a single page of printed text. There are no words in Your House except for the colophon, (the note at the end of the volume which records the details of authorship and publication) -- just the negative space left from laser-cutting each of its 484 leaves.

Artist Olafur Eliasson designed the text block of Your House so that each leaf corresponds to just over two centimeters of horizontal space inside his own home. Turning the pages is a process of constantly discovering new spaces and details as we move through the house. All that's visible from the first few pages are a few doors and windows, but the house quickly opens up into a delicately detailed home complete with domed ceilings, a fireplace, and even a spiral staircase.

When the text block is initially opened, the spine of the book is vertical and the house aligns perfectly. But spine begins to move sideways to accommodate the turning of the pages, skewing the interior space and forcing the reader to look sideways to see into the house. The movement of the pages has other effects, too; even though Your House looks like a solid block of pages from the outside, that the cuts made into each page have resulted in a structure so delicate that the simple act of turning a page can warp a window frame or tear a step from a staircase.

Ask for Presses L559ely to see Eliasson's house for yourself.

Posted for Anne Peale '11

Jared P. Hubbard

"Dear Mother. We are at last out of fighting…at least for a while." So begins one of the letters from Jared P. Hubbard, a Union soldier with the Second Regiment New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry, to his mother. Jared was twenty-four when he joined the army. Married, he wrote to his wife Judith regularly, telling her about his experiences and describing his surroundings. The 2nd New Hampshire regiment, organized in 1861, was the longest serving volunteer regiment of the State of New Hampshire fighting in all the major battles of the Civil War, from Bull Run to Gettysburg. At Gettysburg Jared narrowly escaped death when "the cannonading was the most terrific ever seen. The shells passed over our heads so close that we could feel the wind of it." Death, however, was everywhere. "The ground was actually covered with dead and wounded men, union and rebels all together, with hundreds of horses, and the stench was awful."

51,000 men died in the three-day battle. Jared's regiment, which had entered the battle with 353 soldiers, saw 47 killed, 136 wounded and 36 missing in the first three hours. When not in battle Jared's letters depict the sometimes mundane, every day life of a Union soldier, from asking for more shirts and stamps from his wife to scolding his mother for her accusation that he cared "nothing for her interest."

To read more of Jared's letters ask for MS-1157.

Not to be removed from the Reading Room

The materials in Rauner are available for use only in our reading room, but we do at least let our users pick up and handle the items they request. The owners of a German law book in our Bindings collection clearly wanted to make sure the volume's users didn't walk away with the text - so they chained the book to its shelf. The manuscript was written in Latin around 1450 and bound with oak boards thick enough to support the substantial chain, which is fastened with a metal staple through the upper edge of the rear board. This somewhat drastic approach to security was fairly typical in institutional collections. Manuscripts were time-consuming to produce and hard to replace, especially if the source text was difficult to find. The practice of chaining books to their shelves was gradually abandoned as printing made texts cheaper and more easily available and as more fragile pasteboard bindings were substituted for heavy wood covers.

Ask for Bindings 122 to see this relic for yourself.

Posted for Anne Peale '11

The First Commencement

In 1771 the first group of Dartmouth seniors completed their long, arduous and sometimes tedious studies and were about to graduate from this new institution. Dartmouth was not only new, it was rustic. Eleazar Wheelock had arrived in what is now Hanover in August of 1770. With the help of some 50 devoted followers, and a handful of slaves – we must not forget the slaves – Wheelock managed to carve something resembling a community out of the wilderness in the course of the following year.

From Wheelock’s description of the College that first year, we know that after much labor they managed to build a small one-story structure for Wheelock and his family and another two-story structure to house the students. All, in Wheelock’s words, “in the plainest and cheapest manner.” After several failed attempts, they managed to establish two working wells, but two attempts to build saw mills failed completely.  Some small additions to these buildings were made the following summer. 

By other accounts we know that the town itself was growing up around the College, since there was, by the time of the first Commencement, an inn or tavern nearby. Rough though the town and College still were, Wheelock put a good face on things. In a letter to a friend he wrote that Hanover was beginning to become a “habitable world.”

Somehow, in the midst of all this building, well digging and sawing, Wheelock managed to hold something resembling classes. In August of 1771, he was ready to graduate four students (no, they were not necessarily geniuses; they had been studying with Wheelock prior to his arrival in New Hampshire). 

John Wentworth

Courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art

Currently on view
at the Hood Musuem of Art
in the American gallery

Wheelock called together the Board of Trustees to grant these first students their degrees. Invitations also went out to John Wentworth, the Royal Governor of the colony then in residence at Portsmouth, the New Hampshire Executive Council and many members of the clergy in New England.

In those days, travel to the Upper Valley was a somewhat arduous affair. Roads were, in Wheelock’s words, “new and bad.” Thus it should have come as no particular surprise that only one of the Trustees managed to show his face. Interestingly, an article in the Boston Evening-Post describing the affair noted that the audience included “a concourse of other persons beyond all expectation.” Of course, this might just have been a nice way of saying more people managed to make the journey than could have been expected under the circumstances.

But the poor showing by the Trustees was just the beginning of the problems that would beset this first of many celebrations. Governor Wentworth, clearly a hardier or more devoted soul than many of the Trustees, may have been the person who coined the good Yankee phrase “Ya can’t get thar from here.” The Governor and his retinue, numbering sixty or more by some accounts, were forced by the lack of roads running east and west in New Hampshire—a problem that persists into our own time—to travel by a wildly circuitous route. They began by going north to Wolfeboro and then through Haverhill, camping by the open road several nights in a row. Frustrated by this trip, Wentworth would later build an almost direct route from Portsmouth to Hanover that came to be known—fittingly—as the Governor’s road. Parts of this ancient highway still exist today, but alas, for those of us traveling east, much of it has returned to its original state—forest.

Once all were assembled, it was found that because they were lacking a quorum of the Trustees, they could not actually award the degrees. Instead, each graduate was issued a simple piece of paper in place of a formal diploma until such time as a proper vote could be taken.

From here, things went from bad to worse. The only thing that seems to have cooperated was the weather. “There was a stand erected… from which each graduate presented the assembly with an oration. The graduates then performed an anthem that they had composed and set to music.” Following the ceremony there was a meal. Unfortunately Mrs. Wheelock was “sick in bed and wholly confined to her chamber” and thus unable to participate in any of the proceedings. This was particularly unfortunate, as Wheelock explained later, because “the chief cook I had depended upon for the College was laid asleep it was said, by making too free with the bottle.” In the same letter Wheelock notes, “We were indeed in very trying circumstances.” All in all, it was pretty rough affair and some of the finer gentry in the crowd “turned up their noses at the plainness of the surroundings.”

The Wentworth Bowl

After his return to Portsmouth, Governor Wentworth sent Wheelock a gift. This gift was no small piece and carried a great deal of symbolism. He sent a large silver bowl, weighing, by one account, sixty-six ounces or just over four pounds. But this was not just a bowl, or as some have called it, a “punch-bowl with a movable crown”; it was a monteith. A monteith, for those who don’t have one of these at home—or have never heard of this article—is a bowl for chilling wine glasses. The crown is for holding the stems so that the cup of the glass can rest in the cold water inside the bowl. 

What is significant about this gift is that a monteith is something that only a gentleman of high station would have in his house—a member of the nobility as Wentworth was. Remember that Wheelock lived in a rude log cabin in the midst of a wilderness that had only recently been shaped into something resembling a settlement. The gift of the monteith can be seen as symbolic gesture. Though the College was a crude and rough place where an elegant silver monteith would serve little or no function, Wentworth’s gift showed that he hoped it would grow to be a place where such an item was not out of place – in short, that Dartmouth would become a shining, elegant and revered thing in time.  Wentworth gave this bowl as something for the College to grow into.

So, at each Commencement, as we look back on and celebrate the rough beginnings of the College, we should also remember the monteith as a symbol of what Dartmouth must always strive to be.

Ask for:

A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon, in Connecticut: From the Year 1768, to the Incorporation of it with Dartmouth-College, and Removal and Settlement of it in Hanover, in the Province of New-Hampshire, 1771: DC Hist E97.6.M5 W55 1771

Eleazar Wheelock, Hanover, NH to Moses Peck, August 5, 1771, regarding conditions in Hanover: DC Hist Mss 771455.3

Aaron Storrs, Portsmouth NH to Eleazar Wheelock, August 10, 1771, regarding roads: DC Hist Mss 771460

Eleazar Wheelock, Hanover, NH to William Patton, September 2, 1771, regarding success of Commencement: DC Hist Mss 771455.3

Vertical Files: Commencement 1771-

The Wentworth Bowl, Realia 109