This article is featured in the 2026 Freshman Special Issue.
To the Class of 2030,
Over the next couple of weeks, you’re going to become familiarized with a whole lot of Dartmouth’s traditional iconography, and for a short while, it’s going to seem as if these icons will play a significant role in your time here. Perhaps the most familiar of them is the Lone Pine. You’ll sing about it standing above Dartmouth when you recite the lyrics of your alma mater. Its silhouette will be front and center on the new sweatshirts and t-shirts you buy from the Dartmouth Co-Op. If you’re like me, you might even do a quick Google search to read about its history.
At the end of your orientation, you’re going to march alongside your peers over to the Bema, a green space nestled in the groves of College Park, the same grounds where the Lone Pine once stood. You’ll sing the alma mater together, and for a moment, you’ll feel steeped in that traditional image of the College in the wilderness. For many of you, this might be one of only a few times you ever step inside the Bema or College Park. By November, the Lone Pine will probably be the last thing you think about when you think about Dartmouth.
The truth is that the Lone Pine or College Park simply do not make much of an appearance in most students’ daily lives. Dartmouth students often know College Park and the Bema in very limited contexts: the site of a pledge task; the occasional DJ set; one of several campus locations designated for more… adventurous activities. Most of these activities are tied in some way to Greek life or Dartmouth’s party culture more generally, and it’s thus no wonder that Keggy the Keg has become a much more immediately relevant icon for most Dartmouth students than the Lone Pine. These activities are great fun, and they’re our way as Dartmouth students to show love to old traditions by adding a humorous twist. But this is still only one of many ways one can engage with this space, and it’s both far from the original vision the space’s creators had and detached from what this space meant to the classes before us.
Before College Park had even been officially designated, graduating seniors would gather upon the hill by the Lone Pine starting as far back as 1828. The tree became the designated location of Class Day in 1854 until it suffered an unfortunate series of events in an 1887 lightning strike and an 1892 windstorm that forced the College to cut it down in 1895. Bartlett Tower, the stone tower in College Park located next to the former site of the Lone Pine, was in turn conceived as a successor to the tree, intended as a campus attraction that alumni would return to and “from its top will gaze fondly down at each familiar place.” Today, the tower sits in the shade, permanently closed. The monument that was supposed to preserve the memory of the Lone Pine has itself been forgotten.
The Bema, meanwhile, was cleared in 1882 and throughout its history has held Commencement and convocation ceremonies, among other events. But College Park as a whole has had to fend off multiple threats of new construction throughout its history in order to be what it is today. In the 1890s, it was considered as a potential site for a new expansion of campus but was spared in favor of a northward expansion that gave us the space on which Baker-Berry Library stands today. As evidence of the Bema’s descent into obscurity, it was itself threatened in the 1960s as a potential site for what would end up becoming the River Cluster dorms.
Today, thankfully, College Park has survived largely unscathed, but its memory and what it means to the Dartmouth community has not fared quite as well. There’s an opportunity for you to change that.
What I’m asking of you, freshmen, is quite simple. I’m asking you to consider what this space has meant to the Dartmouth community throughout its history. I’m asking you to take the image of the Lone Pine and the College in the wilderness that you’re going to be fed these next couple of weeks and hold onto it beyond just your first few weeks. From this, I hope you build your own relationship with College Park, outside of the limited contexts in which a student might be familiar with it. Find out what this space means to you. Take a walk through it. Grab your musical instrument and practice in the Bema. Practice your photography. And as you walk through the park and are reminded of the Lone Pine and Bartlett Tower, I hope you learn to pay more attention to the history around you. Both the good and certainly the bad. Because when we forget how we got here, tradition becomes nothing more than a gimmick.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
