Though the spire of Baker Library Tower and the old stone fence along the Green are reminders of the ghosts from centuries of Dartmouth past, no part of campus is a more haunting reminder of Dartmouth days of old than the College's cemetery.
Along Tuck Drive and behind the Massachusetts Row dorms is an enormous cemetery spanning more than three centuries of Dartmouth history. In the late 18th and the first half of the 19th century, when people arrived in Hanover by boat, the cemetery was the first thing they saw.
The Dartmouth College cemetery is one of 10 cemeteries from the original Hanover township and is by far the largest. There are at least 900 headstones that date before World War I in the College cemetery, and Hanover townspeople from all walks of life are buried there.
Final Resting Places of Famous (and not so famous) Faces
The cemetery is full of names of influential Dartmouth families that also adorn buildings around campus. From the Wheelocks to the Hitchcocks to the Choates, prominent Dartmouth families lie side by side with working Hanover townspeople.
George Smith, town baker, was buried there in 1905 next to C.A. Young, a Dartmouth professor who died in 1908, and near William Cory, a laborer who died in 1892 rest several College presidents, including Eleazar Wheelock, John Kemeny, Francis Brown, Samuel Bartlett, and William Jewett Tucker.
While the cemetery began as a mere one acre plot, it has expanded to just under four acres. Due to space concerns, expansion of the cemetery has been halted for several decades.
The original acre is the oldest and is home to many of the most familiar graves, including that of College founder Eleazar Wheelock himself, as well as the infamous Student Row, where students were buried before the railway reached White River Junction in 1847.
The oft searched for grave of Wheelock himself is in this old acre. Far from being the loftiest tomb, Wheelock's tomb is rather plain. It is above ground, and, according to archaeology professor Jeremy Rutter, his headstone has been replaced several times.
The day The Dartmouth visited Wheelock's grave, it was adorned with candles in the shape of a pentagram, perhaps from some recent homage to the founder.
Intriguing Epitaphs
Near Wheelock are the unlucky 10 or so students who make up Students' Row. They died of a range of causes, the most common being consumption -- a generic name for a bad flu or cough, often tuberculosis -- or drowning in the Connecticut River.
One unlucky fellow named Armory Holbrook died in 1816, apparently while bathing in the Connecticut River.
Other mysterious deaths in the cemetery include one unfortunate member of the Hanover community who is said to have been "killed by a tree."
Town hermit Sally Duget died in 1854 and her gravestone reads, "Here lies the mortal wreck of Sally Duget. In the midst of society she lived alone beneath the mockery of her cheerfulness. She had deep woes in the ruins of her intellect. The kindness of her hart survived. She perished in the snow in the night of Feb 26, 1854."
A member of the maintenance staff buried in the cemetery has an epitaph which calls him a "Professor of Dust and Ashes."
Debauchery and Defilement
Though Safety and Security claim that in the recent past there have been no reports of vandalism or debauchery in the cemetery, historically it has been home to many of Dartmouth student's less-than-academic endeavors.
Rumor has it, according to Lynn Rainville '93, who wrote a thesis about the cemetery's history,that sometime during the 19th century, several students dug up a pauper's grave and put him on the cemetery fence for all the students to see.
In 1943, an editorial in The Dartmouth mused that keeping a graveyard near a medical school was begging for an enterprising Dartmouth Medical School student to turn into a grave robber.
In the late 1960s, Mrs. James Don McCallum complained that students were abusing the sanctity of the graveyard. "Percey Conner told me at the time that students used [Wheelock's tomb] as a table, left beer cans, etc., and it was impossible to keep the Wheelock site as he felt it should be," she wrote in a letter to the Dartmouth.
The cemetery was a place of prominent sunbathing in the 1970s, until Safety and Security banned the activity.
Just a decade ago, an over-ambitious student in Rutter's Introduction to Classical Archaeology class was accused of grave robbing after removing the headstone from one of the graves in the cemetery.
After an assignment in his class to choose a few headstones an analyze them as if the students were archaeologists from the future, one female student allegedly took a few of the headstones back to her room for further study, and placed them in her window for all of campus to see.
Another student in the class notified Safety and Security and the officers recovered the headstones from the students room, and she was subjected to discipline by the College.
Since then Rutter said he emphasizes not to touch or remove anything from the cemetery.
