There was a fleeting period early in my time at Dartmouth when every space was novel to me, and my eyes at any moment drifted well beyond the direction of my destination. I would scan every door and hallway I passed, trying to make sense of every space’s purpose and log in my mind where I could and couldn’t go. That period passed fairly quickly, however, and now I — like most Dartmouth students — move like a drone between the spaces that are relevant to me. Many of us only know Baker-Berry Library, for example, in the context of the parts of it we use: the lobby, to the East Reading Room, to the 1902 Room, to the Tower Room. Everything else hardly exists.
But as tempting as it is to make quick and efficient use of the spaces we need, it could also be worthwhile to pay a little more attention to those extra spaces. We might just end up uncovering hidden treasures among them, and those treasures could teach us quite a bit about our place in Dartmouth’s story.
One such treasure you probably pass by more often than you realize. If I were to mention the hallway across from the East Reading Room, you might struggle to recall what I’m talking about. But tucked away at the end of that hallway, there’s a door that reads “Hough’s Room” in brass lettering, and behind that door is indeed a literal treasure… room. The Treasure Room dates back to Baker’s opening, featuring beautiful stained glass windows with murals commemorating the College’s history. It’s also inaccessible to the public, only used on occasion to host special events.
It wasn’t always that way, however. The Treasure Room was once the primary reception for Dartmouth’s special collections, where students could lose themselves in rare books and archives in a place whose aesthetics did justice to the often mystical nature of those very materials. But when the Rauner Special Collections Library opened in 1998, the room lost its purpose. I imagine its closure now is a matter of historical preservation.
If preserving history really is the goal, though, then leaving the room to drift into obscurity, at the end of a hallway that no one acknowledges, might be the worst fate of all. Preserving history is as much about ensuring it is known as it is about ensuring it is physically intact. As of now, Dartmouth students are left oblivious to a small but meaningful piece of the College’s story, one that could ideally give a student a stronger sense of identity and purpose during their time at this school.
The name on the room’s door, for example, is that of circuit judge Charles Merrill Hough, a member of the Class of 1879. The room was dedicated as a memorial to him, but it’s pretty hard for a room to preserve anyone’s memory when the room itself is forgotten. Students might never learn about Hough’s rulings protecting the press from a government libel suit or preserving an inventor’s patent rights in the face of a challenge from Ford Motor Company. If even just one student, in using the Treasure Room, looks into Hough’s story and feels reassured in pursuing their own career in public service, then his legacy, and the room that was made to carry it, will have fulfilled its purpose.
Even still, the story the room has to tell extends beyond just Hough’s legacy. The room’s history as the home of Dartmouth’s special collections is bound to raise useful questions in students’ minds about the history of our current special collections library at Rauner. Of the few friends I’ve spoken with about this admittedly niche topic, most were completely unaware that Rauner was once an auditorium and as such were unaware of the pivotal episodes in Dartmouth’s history that took place there, among them a student riot against segregationist George Wallace in 1967. Just as with Hough’s story, these stories could be what one student needs to discover their place at Dartmouth. And yet the currently utilitarian, day-to-day relationship between students and the spaces they inhabit leaves no room for these stories to be told.
Now, it might seem for a moment that I’ve gotten ahead of myself here. Surely opening up a tiny old room won’t singlehandedly transform the relationship students have with Dartmouth’s historical context. And indeed, that process requires quite a bit of responsibility on the part of us students to actually search for that context, lest the Treasure Room becomes just another space we move in and out of.
Still, action on the part of the College to make the Treasure Room a public space would be a much-needed first step that could help encourage students to think critically about Dartmouth’s story. A newly opened Treasure Room could be just enough to disrupt the routine and instead draw students’ attention to the other places around them. It could be enough to give the campus a sense of depth, a sense that there is more to explore. And that all could be just enough to push students to search for more lost treasures, whether in the form of physical spaces or the stories those spaces tell. Maybe then those students would realize the power of their own actions and words. Maybe then they’d be moved to leave behind some treasures of their own.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
