Dartmouth Outing Club founder Fred Harris '11 spurred the event's creation with a 1909 editorial in The Dartmouth calling for an annual winter athletic showcase. Although Harris sprained his ankle escaping the South Fayerweather dormitory when it burned to the ground and was unable to attend the first "Winter Meet" himself, his voice was heard, and the ancestor of the Carnival was first held on February 26, 1910 at Occom Pond.
The ski races and hockey game of the first meet were joined by social activities the next year, and the popularity of Winter Carnival began to climb.
The snowy wonderland caught the attention of "The Great Gatsby" author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked with Budd Schulberg '36 to write the screenplay for a film titled "Winter Carnival." In 1939 the two came to the College to pick up footage and ideas for their movie.
Many Dartmouth students today find it difficult to balance work with Carnival festivities, and for Fitzgerald it was no different. Spending the weekend participating in the revelry instead of filming it, especially in the basements of Psi Upsilon and Alpha Delta fraternities, Fitzgerald was finally fired from the movie in a humiliating scene in front of the Hanover Inn.
Upon his return to New York, Fitzgerald allegedly checked himself into a sanitarium to recover from the weekend's events.
Carnival's fame continued into the '40s, as the "Queen of the Snows" beauty pageant competition attracted special attention. Women from all over New England, especially the Seven Sister colleges, flocked to Hanover for the weekend, and most of the competition's contestants were drawn from that pool. The winner was declared Queen of the Snows and awarded a silver cup, but the prize did not always end there. The 1946 queen, Faye Chase, became a media darling, with coverage in The New York Times, Boston Globe and Life Magazine, among dozens of other publications.
By the 1950s, Winter Carnival was a bona fide social event, drawing the who's who of New England to snowy Hanover. In 1952 there were enough visitors to build an eight-mile long traffic jam of cars trying to enter the town.
The Carnival's popularity was so great during its heyday that it prompted CBS to tape the celebration in 1960, and also attracted advertisers Pepsi and Campbell's Soup to use the landscape as the setting for national commercials. Campbell's television ad for beef bouillon soup reputedly made beef bouillon punch a popular fraternity drink for the year.
The College garnered national media attention in the early '70s as well, before the advent of coeducation at Dartmouth with their celebrated Queen of the Snows competition.
The fraternity snow sculpture competition, which is no longer in existence, was formalized in 1927.
Bones Gate fraternity member Jack Boyles '76 remembered nudity being a theme of some fraternity snow sculptures built during his time at Dartmouth. He mentioned "Snow White and the seven boobs" as one example.
"Some went according to the rules, and some got kind of crude with their sculptures, but it was always great fun to see what they'd come up with," Boyles said.
The mixture of class and crass was a theme of the entire carnival, not just the sculptures. Boyles' wife, Mount Holyoke alumna Linda Boyles, said she liked to see the contrast between the Carnival's elegant beginnings and the unruliness that ensued. Friday night there were a number of dressy events like the dinner at Bones Gate, she said, where females wore long cocktail dresses and everyone was on their best behavior.
"Then it just went downhill," she said. "The rugs were rolled up, the furniture was put out, the huge vat started making drinks."
Females from other schools continued to attend the weekend since the male-to-female ratio was still far from even, and the same urgency to participate continued from previous decades. Linda Boyles remembered that in the blizzard of '78, when the roads from Boston were closed, "people did everything to try and get to Carnival."
Only medical personnel were permitted to travel on the roads, and "anyone who could put on a nurse's uniform to get up did," Boyles said. "There hasn't been a snow like that since then. It was really pretty unbelievable. Hanover was like this mecca in the middle where things were still going on, while Boston was shut down completely."
Though Carnival's status during the 1970s didn't compare to what it had been in the 1950s, it hadn't entirely disappeared. Jack Boyles said when his fraternity brothers from Atlanta and Dallas invited their high school sweethearts up for the weekend, the women's attendance was published in the society pages of their local newspapers.
"We all had a good laugh about it, because it was just a great party for us," Boyles said.
Today, Carnival's national prominence has diminished, but the athletic events, snow sculptures and rowdy parties that made it famous carry on. More recent innovations like the luge run from the top of Theta Delta Chi fraternity and Psi U Keg Jump have been discontinued because of safety concerns, but the introduction of the Polar Bear Swim in '94 shows that students' creativity and fun-loving spirit will let Carnival continue to evolve.
