One learns from an abstract of a Quebec conference paper titled “Le Remplacement du Pont de Ledyard” that each of the four piers and abutments of the late-1990s Ledyard Bridge required a different type of foundation construction, since the riverbed and bedrock at that crossing are so irregular.

The Hill Winds Society is producing a book on school traditions with an organization called the Sphinx Foundation. The foundation is connected with the Sphinx Senior Society but not the College, as an editorial in The Dartmouth explains. It has Professor Emeritus Jere Daniell speak on different Dartmouth history topics now and then and sponsored his recent talk on the Wheelock Succession (article in The Dartmouth). The foundation apparently sends letters to incoming students.

The Dartmouth Outing Club Centennial is approaching at the beginning of 2009 and the club now has a page up with an ambitious schedule of activities.

Erik Anjou’s and Mark Bernstein’s documentary Eight: Ivy League Football and America has been released (The Dartmouth, Big Green Alert Blog). The official page suggests that the film shares with Bernstein’s book the shaky contention that the first intercollegiate football game was played in 1869. There was a “football” game played that year, but it was “football” in the English sense, what Americans now call soccer. The first college football game (ancestor of today’s American/gridiron football) was not played until 1874, when McGill’s rugby team played Harvard.

A well-illustrated article on Hanover’s postwar Modernists, Edgar and Margaret Hunter, considers their work in the context of other North Carolina architects.

The former automobile dealership of Clement Hall, whose main block was built in 1914 using mill construction, will be demolished within days. The Dartmouth. Many governments require landowners seeking permission to demolish historic buildings to mitigate the effects of the destruction of history at least somewhat by documenting the building to HABS standards. While Dartmouth has announced its voluntary compliance with regulations designed to protect the natural environment, it seems to lag behind others, including state schools, when it comes to the cultural environment. One hopes that a basic set of large-format black and white photographs, at least, will survive after Clement Hall is torn down.

The Moosilauke Advisory Committee recommends that Dartmouth demolish the historic Moosilauke Ravine Lodge (Richard Butterfield, 1938-39) near Warren, New Hampshire.

The article on the Committee’s recommendation in The Dartmouth does not suggest that the Committee has consulted with an accredited preservation architect, or an architect who is familiar with historic log buildings. The reasons given for demolishing Dartmouth’s most unusual and most sustainable building are not yet very convincing:

Reason   ::   Typical solution
logs cracking   ::   seal them
logs rotting   ::   replace them
current building codes   ::   upgrade/overlook - most old buildings fail
not large enough   ::   add on by extending the Great Hall

The idea that the building was “built to last 50 years” is especially insidious because every building has such a number. No one in 1938 planned for Moosilauke to be demolished in 1988 any more those who built Moore or Berry in 1998 planned to have it torn down in 2048. A “lifetime” number exists for every building and simply describes the period after which significant elements will need replacement. Swapping out logs or replacing a roof is nothing a competent construction crew cannot handle.

Dartmouth should not let the cost of proper maintenance justify destruction, even if an historic log building might cost a bit more to maintain than the cheap imitation that would replace it. The Lodge was built by volunteers and low-paid local loggers, during the Depression, which means that Dartmouth has been enjoying the savings of a low initial purchase price for 70 years. A little extra expense today would be well justified.

Destroying the Ravine Lodge would also waste all of the energy the building embodies, and by rights it should prevent any replacement from claiming to be “green.” The Lodge was constructed using sustainable local timber hauled by horses. All of its systems are indefinitely replaceable and will not tie up valuable metals or harmful chemicals in landfills when they are thrown away after failing suddenly at the end of their useful lives, as the parts of a new building will do.

The college that is gearing up to celebrate the centennial of its Outing Club, that is sincerely dedicated to meeting voluntary “green” regulations, and that produces graduates such as William McDonough should be embarrassed to consider destroying the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. Just as with any other National-Register eligible building, if parts of it are broken, they need to be fixed. Before any demolition takes place, I’d hope that Dartmouth justify such a decision by reporting no that federal and state historic preservation laws will be implicated; that a certified preservation architect with log building experience has written off the building; and that the replacement will not seek any kind of LEED certification.

Thanks to Big Green Alert Blog for pointing out this 1913 New York Times article (pdf) describing the decision of the Dartmouth team to put numbers on their uniforms. “Spectators Will Be Enabled to Distinguish Players.”

At the beginning of June, Princeton Architectural Press published Dartmouth College: The Campus Guide. At the moment it is available from Barnes & Noble and the press.

As is the case with any book, a few errors have crept in, and they are being collected in this pdf document. Readers are encouraged to email comments, error sightings, and updates to dartmo@gmail.com.

The Planning arm of the OPDC has expanded its Web content lately. Now there are historic maps and aerial photos available. The College Planner, Joanna Whitcomb, even has a blog.

Most interesting is the very extensive file of planning documents of the last decade. There are some remarkable items here:

Machado & Silvetti’s 2006 presentation on the Visual Arts Center to the Board of Trustees (pdf);

Kieran Timberlake’s 2006 Basis of Design for the Thayer Dining Hall Replacement (pdf) (good news: at least at the time of that presentation, the demolition of South Fairbanks was not part of the proposal; instead the architects presented a clever plan to close the south end of Mass Row and loop vehicles from Wheelock Street behind the church and back to the street);

Saucier & Flynn’s 2007 Landscape Master Plan (pdfs) (interesting proposal to establish a public square or plaza between Leverone and Thompson)

Centerbrook’s SLI study (pdf) (including intersting things reported but not shown on line in the late 1990s, such as an idea for a building to join Collis, Robinson, and Thayer; and the big building idea that led to Floren);

Photos of a model of the ‘53 Commons pdf) emphasizing the glassy tower;

Dartmouth’s 2002 Master Plan (pdf (which mentions the idea of building a regional conference center, probably not in town; the Trustees’ long-held goal of demolishing the entire River Cluster; the one-time consideration of building an off-site commissary to serve all dining halls; the idea of putting a parking garage on the lot next to Cummings; and, strangest of all, the rejection of a proposal to move Thayer School to Lyme Road!).

The third Images of America book about Hanover by Frank J. Barrett, Jr. is now available: Early Dartmouth College and Downtown Hanover. Its coverage of the old frame buildings that preceded today’s brick commercial blocks downtown is excellent. There are photos of obscure campus buildings, Rowley Hall and Allen Hall, and rare photos of relatively temporary or mundane buildings such as the Hanover Diner and the first Sachem Village, both on Lebanon Street. Hanover before 1900 or 1920 seems to have been characterized by jumbled small-scale clapboard-sided buildings — the level and density and great variety of materials and details visible at the level of the pedestrian was extremely high.

Dartmouth sold to the state the eight-acre part of the summit of Mount Washington it was given in 1962. The Dartmouth. Dartmouth sold or gave the summit of Mount Moosilauke to the state some time ago.

The school recently celebrated the Roth Center’s first decade. Vox, The Dartmouth.

The College might publish a coffee-table book in 2009 with all of the Winter Carnival posters in commemoration of the Dartmouth Outing
Club’s Centennial, according to The Dartmouth, citing Archivist Peter Carini.

So “Indians” is a relatively recent nickname of the 1918-1925 period, and “Green,” at least as adjective, may be as early as the 1860s, when the color was selected. When did “the Big Green” emerge as a complete nickname?

The words “big Green” began appearing in the New York Times by 1911, but only as adjectives describing nouns such as “team,” “line,” “eleven,” “players,” “machine,” “skaters,” “five,” etc. The phrase applied not just to football but all sports, apparently. The most frequent use was “the big Green team” (1911), but “the big Green line” (1911) also was popular. Writers also used “Hanoverians” and many other terms. A September 9, 1916 article from the Fort Wayne News wrote stated that it was “necessary to uphold the fame of the ‘Big Green’ team”; the Atlanta Constitution wrote in a November 20, 1921 headline that “Dartmouth’s Big Green Machine Arrives Early.” This use of “big Green” as an adjective continued into the 1940s.

When was “Big Green” used as a noun phrase on its own? In the shorthand phrasing of newspaper headlines, it appeared by 1916. A November 11, 1916 article in the Times uses the headline “Big Green Practices Here,” for example. The first line of the article, however, used the earlier form when it stated that “The big Green team from Dartmouth arrived here yesterday . . .”

The first use of “Big Green” as we know it today might be in the Times of October 28, 1923, where the article stated that “the Big Green began its march for its first touchdown.” The following football seasons of the early 1920s saw many such uses: “the Big Green, passed [. . .] its way through a stubborn Chicago team here today” (Decatur Review (November 14, 1925)), etc.

The Class of 1978 Life Sciences Building is taking the place of Strasenburgh Hall, a cramped Medical School office building. Strasenburgh was built as a dormitory, and for that reason it was the only building on the School’s “original” (1950-1980) campus not designed by SBRA: the dormitory, like its Tuck School counterpart Buchanan Hall, was designed by the consulting architects of the College, Campbell Aldrich & Nulty.

Dartmouth Medicine magazine (Winter 2006) has an article by Jennifer Durgin on Strasenburgh’s past, and it includes an excellent aerial photo of the medical campus. Strasenburgh’s small scale and busy faceting made it one of the least unappealing buildings of the group.

Edward Gray’s article “American Arriviste” in Humanities 28:6 (November/December 2007) is about John Ledyard.

The Collegiate Way links to an article in Portuguese on the University of Coimbra’s lost colleges (translation by Google). The university claims to be the oldest in Portugal, founded in 1290 (Wikipedia), and once had more than two dozen colleges (map) founded between 1527 and 1779. They were dissolved in 1834, however, and now some of their surviving buildings house university departments.

Dartmouth’s design office updated its complete list of projects in December (pdf). Renovations of New Hampshire Hall and the Inn are in the works, along with the creation or upgrading of a multipurpose sports field.

Dartmouth has also bought and is renovating the neighboring houses at 25 and 27 South Park Street and plans to rent each one to a sorority. Alpha Xi Delta will move from Webster Avenue, where it has rented the Beta Theta Pi House, and Alpha Phi will occupy a house for the first time, The Dartmouth reports. Both have been identified as designs of Jens Larson.

This is the front (west) facade of number 25.

This is number 27. To the right at number 29 is Fire & Skoal, also a Larson design.

The houses screen Thompson Arena.

A 2005 presentation by Henry Bedingfeld, “English Grants of Arms in America,” summarized by the College of Arms Foundation, shows the surprising extent of the honorary grants of arms to institutions in the U.S. following a 1960 decision to begin making such grants. The list includes a number of schools:

• Georgia State College (1968)
• Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia (1976)
• Winthrop College, South Carolina (1980)
• Middle Georgia College (1983)
• George Washington University, Washington, D.C. (1997)

A sampling of the other institutions:

• Town of Kingston, North Carolina (1960)
• Prince George’s County, Maryland (1976)
• The Commonwealth of Virginia (1976)
• St. Thomas Church in New York City (1975)
• Rich’s Department Store, Atlanta (1967)
• The Mescalero Apache Tribe (1986)

Some of these recipients are surprisingly downbeat about their arms. Winthrop University, as it is called now, has one of those exhaustive graphic standards manuals (pdf) describing how to use its new shield-like logo, but it relegates its genuine coat of arms to one fuzzy black-and-white image at the back. The school’s “Treasures and Traditions” information pdf describes the coat of arms matter-of-factly and does not mention its origin in the College of Arms.