Tonight, as students gather on the Green and alumni return to Hanover, the College will see its 103rd Dartmouth Night as the Class of 2002 runs around and around its huge bonfire in honor of one of Dartmouth's oldest traditions for Homecoming Weekend.
Though the weekend previously has been called Dartmouth Night, the word "Homecoming" came into use in the 1980s. Today, Dartmouth Night refers to the first night of the celebration.
On the first-ever Dartmouth Night, 103 years ago in September 1895, College President William Jewett Tucker addressed and gave his blessing to the crowd assembled in Dartmouth Hall. After welcoming the Class of 1899, he explained that Dartmouth Night would "promote class spirit and would initiate freshmen into the community." Its purpose, he said, was "to perpetuate the Dartmouth spirit, and to capitalize the history of the College."
A year later, at the second Dartmouth Night, "Men of Dartmouth," written by Richard Hovey of the Class of 1885, was introduced as the official College alma mater.
Homecoming has changed considerably since the early years, when the weekend's focus was not quite so much on revelry and fun, but instead on reading telegrams from alumni around the world, singing by the Glee Club, speeches up to nine hours long by the College President, parades led by the marching band, fireworks and a bonfire on the Green.
At first, the festivities took place in the chapel in Dartmouth Hall, and were then moved to Webster Hall when the building was finished in 1907. The address of the night's guest speaker and alumni speeches were held in front of Dartmouth Hall, and later the entire evening was held outside on the Green.
The blazing bonfire tradition, now Homecoming's central event, actually preceded the first Dartmouth Night by two years. 17 years earlier, after the College's baseball team defeated Manchester College, the crowd celebrated by spontaneously collecting anything at hand into a pile and setting it afire on the Green. In 1893, after a Dartmouth football victory over Amherst College, the College saw its first organized bonfire.
In the past century, the bonfire and Homecoming Weekend have had a history of pranks, strange incidents and even violence.
The freshman tradition of running circles around the bonfire was born in 1904, when pajama-clad students did just that as the year's special guests Winston Churchill and Lord Dartmouth looked on.
Several times in the history of Homecoming, strange incidents have made the bonfire memorable.
In 1968, a prank delayed the lighting of the bonfire for 20 minutes, as three members of the Dartmouth Outing Club replaced the kerosene used to light the fire with water. Temporarily, the bonfire was lit by the torch, but was soon extinguished when someone threw more of what he assumed to be kerosene on it. The DOC pranksters then gave in and told the confused freshmen where the real kerosene was.
Several years later, in 1971, an Etna farmer donated his barn so the College could have a bonfire. Students, however, narrowly missed turning the Homecoming fire into a fiasco when they went to the wrong barn to gather the wood. Two days later, a farmer with a police escort arrived at the College demanding that the students return his cow stanchions -- poles used for tethering cows.
During the Vietnam War, a lack of interest even caused a five-year hiatus of the bonfire tradition in the late 1960s. Also, during the two World Wars, concern for the troops abroad caused scaled-down ceremonies for Dartmouth Night.
In 1988, with 10,000 spectators gathered on the Green, the bonfire burned 10 feet high but did not collapse. The next morning, the charred structure was still standing and bulldozers had to tear it down. The wood had contained too much moisture for it to burn well.
Apart from accidents and unusual circumstances, violence has also played a role in Homecoming history.
In 1983, the Class of 1987 was forced to dissemble their bonfire piece by piece after a dynamite scare. When no explosives were found, the students rebuilt the structure.
A year later, the efforts of upperclassmen to sabotage the freshmen's bonfire caused a face-off on the Green between students and the Hanover Police. The situation escalated when about 600 students, many of them intoxicated and wielding baseball bats and hockey sticks, engaged in violent and destructive behavior when upperclassmen threatened to storm the bonfire. As a result, the College halted construction of the bonfire for one day.
In 1993, students from the Class of 1997 jumped on parked cars and uprooted street signs in Hanover during their Freshman Sweep.
Since the incidents in 1993, Freshman Sweep has become much more controlled, as freshmen are led by students in the Green Key Honor Society and Safety and Security officers.
