Dartmouth and New Hampshire seem nearly synonymous, but the College's sylvan setting on the Hanover plain could have ended up being in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley and we would be singing about "the coal of Pennsylvania in our throats and our lungs."
It all began as a twinkle in the eye of a gentleman by the unusual name of Eleazar Wheelock. A Yale man (ugh), Wheelock was a Congregational minister with a proselytizing streak who set up shop in the small town of Lebanon, Conn. In 1743 he took on as a pupil colonial-era holy men often tutored students to augment their small salaries a Mohegan named Samson Occom, who proved to be a model student. Occom was so successful that Wheelock dispatched him to England in 1766 to raise funds for a new charity school devoted to the education and Christianization of the Native American. Notable benefactors included King George III and the Earl of Dartmouth, in whose honor the College would ultimately be named.
Wheelock's Connecticut location struggled to attract Native American pupils, however, and he soon sought a fresh start farther north.
Wheelock arrived in Hanover in 1770 and began the arduous task of clearing the land. The banks of the Connecticut were carpeted with a virgin forest of massive white pines, some of which towered at nearly 300 feet. He persevered, however, and oversaw the graduation of Dartmouth's first class in 1771, four men strong. Upon his death in 1779, his more conventionally-named son John took over.
The younger Wheelock stirred up controversy, however, by meddling in the affairs of the local Church of Christ, whose building still stands behind SAE. He asked the Trustees of the College to intervene, and when they refused, he went to allies in the state legislature. In 1816 the state government instituted a new organization, Dartmouth University, which would exist alongside the College for several years. The University seized all College properties and records, but classes continued in a building on the site of Rollins Chapel. With the help of a generous storekeeper named Wheeler (namesake of Wheeler Hall) the College was able to bankroll a legal defense.
New Hampshire courts initially ruled in favor of the University, but the College appealed all the way to the Supreme Court in 1819, its legal team spearheaded by Daniel Webster, the College's most famous graduate and one of the country's leading lawyers.
"It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those that love it," Webster said in closing as he won the case for the College, a landmark victory and one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in history. Dartmouth College v. Woodward established a precedent that protected all private chartered institutions from state interference.
In 1935 Dartmouth again served as a lightning rod for controversy when abolitionists from the College constructed Noyes Academy, an interracial school, in nearby Canaan. Local New Hampshirites hitched oxen to the building and dragged it into a swamp before burning it to the ground to protest integrated education.
In another slavery-related event, Amos Tuck, a Dartmouth alumni, abolitionist and friend of the great poet John Greenleaf Whittier, helped found the Republican party in New Hampshire and assisted Abraham Lincoln in winning the Republican nomination for president in 1860. His son, Edward Tuck, a banker, would later donate the money for the Tuck School of Business. Founded in 1900, Tuck is the oldest business school in the world.
The College kept on trucking until 1893, when the visionary William Jewett Tucker assumed the presidency. President Tucker grew the enrollment from 493 to 1143 in less than 15 years and began to widen Dartmouth's applicant pool and course offerings. At the onset of his administration, the College had only a handful of buildings, and Bissell Hall (what up freshman dorm) served as the gymnasium. President Tucker engineered a building boom and modernized the physical plant along with the curriculum.
The 20th century saw many changes, from the introduction of the D-Plan to coeducation and Keystone Light. In 2004 Dartmouth was named one of the world's great "enduring institutions" by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton because the College had "changed and grown in unswerving pursuit of success and relevance yet remain[ed] true through time to its founding principles." In 2009 Dr. Jim Yong Kim became the latest to join the Wheelock Succession. And in the fall of 2010, the worst class in Dartmouth's history matriculated, leaving the next chapter of College history yet to be written.
