This year's Commencement will be marked by the appearance of bagpipes and the College's first use of a Jumbotron screen during the ceremony, but in 1833 the event had a slightly different feel gamblers, jugglers and auctioneers awaited graduates on the Green following the ceremony.
Now in its 238th year, the College's Commencement has featured several such unusual visitors over the years, ranging from a roasted ox, to the Secret Service, to a Civil War general.
Only four students all transfer students from Yale University graduated at Dartmouth's first Commencement on August 28th, 1771. Although perhaps small, however, the ceremony was far from lackluster.
John Wentworth, the Governor of New Hampshire at the time, was an honored guest at the event. Wentworth travelled from Portsmouth, N.H., to attend the ceremony and provided a barrel of rum and an ox to be roasted as refreshment after Commencement. Dartmouth legend holds that the chefs at the event, having indulged in the rum, became too intoxicated to actually prepare the intended meal of roasted ox.
The ceremony, held on a platform of rough-hewn boards constructed where Reed Hall now stands, began and ended with a prayer and included orations in both Latin and English. Governor Wentworth also presented President and founder of Dartmouth College Eleazar Wheelock with an inscribed silver bowl at the 1771 Commencement. The Wentworth Bowl is still passed down to each incoming President of the College, as was the governor's original intention.
According to a Commencement history written by English Professor Francis Lane Childs, Class of 1906, early incarnations of the event at the College were celebrated in a manner similar to that of an agricultural fair. One local resident noted in his diary now kept in Rauner Library that in 1794, "the Commencement was supplemented with a horse race."
The throngs of local residents that flooded Hanover for the event came not only to hear the academic exercises, but also to visit the booths and tents selling assorted knickknacks, refreshments, soaps and colognes on the Green.
In 1835 President Nathan Lord made the unusual decision to abolish all ranks and honors for students, and instead required each of the 48 men graduating that year to deliver a ten-minute speech at Commencement on an assigned topic. One reporter commented on the lengthy exercises, saying that they "did no credit to either the class or the College."
General William Tecumseh Sherman delivered the Commencement speech in 1866, drawing on his experiences fighting in the Civil War to give the graduates advice on how to approach the future.
"Your ship is about to sail upon an unknown sea," he said in his speech. "Follow your compass and it will lead you just as surely to your destination as honesty will produce a good man."
Several other distinguished political figures, including former presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, as well as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Salmon P. Chase, Class of 1826, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson '68, have also spoken at past commencements.
Over 10,000 people crowded onto the lawn of Baker Library to hear President Dwight D. Eisenhower's address at the 1953 Commencement. Despite elaborate security precautions, the Secret Service failed to detect a false bomb planted under the graduation platform, which was later brought to their attention by a college electrician.
In his speech, President Eisenhower cited the need to understand communism in order to defeat it.
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed," he told the graduating class.
The 1995 Commencement was moved to Memorial Field due to the large number of people that came to hear President Bill Clinton's address.
In his speech, Clinton told students they should seize opportunities and work to solve societal issues with enthusiasm.
"You must make sense and clarity out of complex problems, and I think you must do it with a much greater sense of optimism and hope than we are seeing in most debates today," he said.
This year's Commencement speaker, Louise Erdrich '76, will join a list of celebrated writers who have given keynote addresses in years past, including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost.
