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The Day on which Old Dartmouth Burned
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By Joseph Rago
One morning in February 1904, among the coldest that winter at twenty below, Dartmouth Hall—contemporaneous
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The Phi Delt miracle was that no one was hurt
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with the origins of the school, the ninth and last colonial college, founded in a place along what then the outermost rim of civilization—burned to the ground. The fire began in a room under the bell-tower on the third floor, and within hours the building was a heap of ashes.
The fire was a trauma in the life of the College, severing the only physical link between the Dartmouth of the 18th century and that of the 20th. Sad to report, the episode has been nearly superseded by a new tragedy that might have dissolved the connective tissue between the Dartmouth of the 20th century and that of the 21st. On January 10, 2010, at 5.30 on Sunday morning, Phi Delta Alpha also caught fire, and though the fraternity was spared a full-dress catastrophe on the order of Dartmouth Hall, it was a close run.
The whole gruesome business recalls the words of Francis Lane Childs 1906: “I suppose perhaps the most eventful day of all my College life is nearly over—the day on which old Dartmouth burned,” he wrote in a letter. “It seems to have created much the same effect as a death would have.”
In fact the Phi Delt miracle was that no one was hurt. The fire started in the chimney and spread insidiously throughout the floors and walls of the second and third stories, and it might have advanced further had not one especially alert senior noted flames issuing forth from a cavity that opened in a wall. All residents, dogs, and “guests” were safely evacuated as the Hanover Fire Department heroically contained the blaze. The Red Cross was called in to aid the refugees, many of whom were shoeless, not to mention homeless.
When the news first spread to the overgraduates it seemed unutterably final. Given that the house is so old and so, well, wooden, I had assumed that if it ever caught fire, it would burn forever. “This is so fucked up,” someone remarked. The comment captured everything. A vigil seemed appropriate, though impossible. So we got drunk.
I saw the house on an emergency visit recently, and the place was grim, if not as grim as I’d expected. Once your eyes adjusted to the jaundiced half-light, much of the interior looked like Sarajevo circa 1991, as a friend put it. The timbers in the roof and gables were badly charred, while the rest of the house suffered extensive smoke and water damage. Possessions have been converted into debris; holes are punctured in the walls, ceilings, and floors, all surfaces are coated with ash, breezes batter you with filth, and litter is everywhere—and nowhere, considering the extent of the squalor.
In other words, the place sort of looked like it usually looks after a particularly fun nine-day weekend. Certainly it was impossible to tell if the trail of muddy footprints running up one wall was the result of the fire or preceded it.
It was a house of decay, and a decaying house. A construction team specializing in disaster mitigation had rigged it up with dehumidifiers and fans to dry it out, and cables snaked up and down every floor and hall, supplying electricity. In effect, the house and its vital organs were on life support, like Terri Schiavo, though in this case, the odds of a full recovery are good.
The undergraduates are in good spirits, the initial shock having passed. On the seven Kübler-Roth stages of grief, they appeared somewhere close to acceptance. But the brotherhood is resilient. It always has been.
Phi Delt was founded in 1884 and the house was finished in 1902; it was built by Alexander Anderson McKenzie 1891, the College’s first superintendent of buildings, after a design by Charles Alonzo Rich 1875, who took as his model the Hancock House in Boston. After a series of fire scares in the 1920s and early 1930s, almost all of the wood-framed fraternity houses on Webster Avenue and elsewhere were taken down and replaced with brick. For some reason, maybe no reason, Phi Delt was reprieved.
Since then, 5 Webster Avenue remained practically unchanged, the house always governed by a preservative instinct—little was thrown away, because nothing was replaceable. The interior decoration, which is the wrong phrase but will have to do, has been more or less the same for decades. While it was a privilege to be there the last moment before the place was rolled up for at least for the next several months, the rooms were empty and desolate, filled only with trash and an abiding sense of loss. A mansion that irradiated a sense of living in history, somehow impervious to the passage of time, had been stripped of most of its material sediment, its quiddities.
Everything that could be salvaged—historic College memorabilia, house relics, old posters and prints curling into parchment—was either boxed up and taken off to storage or admitted into the care of the archival librarians at the Rauner ward. When the flags weren’t colonial they had 48 stars or fewer; the clock used to be the only thing in the house making forward progress, but at some point it, too, had stopped; portions of some rooms are marked up top to bottom with registers where the occupants signed the wall, dating back to 1902 in one instance. A wooden box filled with cassette tapes was recovered from the tunes closet, and while the vinyl record collection was undamaged, it was always an omission that it did not include wax cylinders.
All this was the physical manifestation of a particular moral culture, a code of behaviors and habits and a system of belief that developed at the College over the last century. It is part of the character that makes Dartmouth genuinely distinctive, which is at times taken for granted, or for granite. And while Old Dartmouth is mostly gone—not only people expire, but concepts—it continues to persevere in certain places on campus that believe in a certain kind of remembering, and it always seemed to me that Phi Delt was one of them.
Dartmouth’s fraternities, which held out even as every other New England country college was getting rid of them, are remarkable institutions: their heightened sensitivities to the promises of life, their tendency to ease the distinction between the spirituous and the spiritual, above all their dedication to fostering deep friendships—among life’s great pleasures, and all the grander for their rarity. (You only get so many old friends.) They are an inheritance that belongs to the future as well as the past, which is why Phi Delt will rebuild.
Even as Dartmouth Hall burned, President William Jewett Tucker 1861 and the alumni vowed to re-establish a modern building while preserving the old form in so far as it could be. It worked out pretty well. The exterior is almost a perfect replica, designed by Charles Alonzo Rich. Artifacts incorporated into the current version include three of the old granite steps and the two windows closest to the center doors, which themselves are fitted with locks from recovered from the original hall. A commemorative plaque is cast from bronze recovered from the college bell that melted in the blaze.
At the laying of the new cornerstone, later in 1904, Dr. Tucker read Milton’s translation of the 136th Psalm (“His chosen people he did bless / In the wastfull Wildernes”). Then the College’s historian, Francis Brown 1870, after recounting the foundational years, proclaimed:
These things were history before Dartmouth Hall was built. The vital was before the material. We loved Dartmouth Hall because it embodied these prior and vital things. They are as immortal as the soul of man, and the fire had no power over them. We raise the New Dartmouth Hall in the assured faith that it reaches back over the ruins of the old one, and makes connection with the same past. It is a good past, full of the lives of good and earnest men, who lived beyond themselves. It puts us under bonds.
That is the document of a deeply serious culture, and it is as true now as then, and now as forever.
Joe Rago is a senior editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal
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