Imagine that it's spring and you're lying on the Green enjoying the sun. Now, let's imagine sitting on the Green in 1890: There is a yellow museum where Baker Library usually stands, and Dartmouth Hall is wooden rather than brick. None of "Administration Row" exists, and what about Collis? It has been replaced by another yellow building -- this one called the Balch House.
Our College was here, but our campus was radically different, so how did Dartmouth become the place it is now?
When Eleazar Wheelock arrived on the Hanover plain, there was not a settler to be found for over two miles. Wheelock had chosen the location due to the large number of Native Americans in the area and the utility of the Connecticut River as a transportation route, but mostly because he got a good deal on the land.
Wheelock came to what is now Hanover in August, 1770, and initially lived in a log cabin where Silsby Hall now stands. By September, workers had started on two buildings, one for Wheelock and one for the students. They were not finished by the winter, though, so they all lived in log huts despite the snow. I guess that puts some of my complaints about living in the Choates into perspective.
One could go on for a long time about the founding of the College, the failures and then the triumphs of Dartmouth during its baby years, but on to the actual buildings.
Dartmouth Hall
In its early years, Dartmouth Hall was referred to simply as "the College," as it contained the classrooms, dormitories, the library, a laboratory, a pair of common rooms and even a chapel. In short, it was everything. No wonder alumni were so nostalgic about the building -- they could literally go the entire winter without leaving their dorm.
Before the wooden version of Dartmouth Hall burned down, it managed to withstand previous fires, a tornado and even a cannon attack; Isaac Patterson of the Class of 1812 wrote that one morning after a professor kicked poorly behaved students out of Dartmouth Hall, they came back that evening with an old cannon, "loaded it heavily with powder, applied a slow match, and blew down the obstruction [that had kept them out of the building]."
That's something to try next time you forget your ID card. In the end, those students only had to pay $400 in fines.
As for the real fire, which, for its witnesses most unfortunately of all, happened, on a day when it was 20 degrees below zero, it did a little more damage than the cannon.
"We were assembled in the chapel at 8 o'clock when we heard someone call 'fire'... I saw the flames coming out of the middle window, top story, directly under the clock, my old room you know, freshman year. Dartmouth Hall was 110 years old. Daniel Webster roomed in it. It was our great historic building, as Nassau Hall is to Princeton... The sentiment which we all feel towards the old hall can scarcely be estimated," Charles B. Sylvester '05 (1905, that is) wrote on Feb. 19, 1904 in a letter to his mother.
The gist of the story is that the alumni and students were really sad after Dartmouth Hall burned down, so they rebuilt an almost-exact replica out of brick. This version of the hall was, sadly, without dorm rooms. The brick building has worked out pretty well so far, even after another fire in 1935.
Baker Library
Like Dartmouth Hall, Baker is an excellent place to take pictures for prospective student publications or desktops. Before Baker was at the head of the Green, however, there was the Butterfield Museum (pictued above during demolition). Butterfield Museum was generally disliked because its yellow-brick exterior did not mesh well with the rest of the campus architecture.
One source claims that there was an entire dinosaur skeleton in the grand entrance of the museum, but most writings on the building only mention dinosaur teeth. The museum definitely did, however, have a stuffed zebra and a bunch of other really random curiosities donated by alumni and faculty.
The original campus library, Wilson Hall, was built in 1885, but by 1916 the student body had increased from 400 students to over 2000. Understandably, the school needed a bigger library, and the College decided to tear down Butterfield Museum so that the new larger library could occupy a central place at the head of the Green.
Wilson Hall replaced Butterfield as the campus museum until the Hood Museum of Art was built next door in 1984.
