Dartmouth Hall’s Renovations Near Completion

This piece was published in the Commencement Issue of June 3, 2022, in advance of the Class of 2022’s commencement ceremony one week later on June 10.

After months upon months of scaffolding and noise, observant students will have recently noticed that the seemingly ceaseless construction enveloping Dartmouth Hall has achieved a definite milestone. Some attention is apparently being paid at long last to the art known as landscaping, as evidenced by the Administration’s employment of one of its favorite magic tricks: laying down sod en masse. 

In so doing, the Administration has sought to quickly return the dirt and scattered concrete which long lay before Dartmouth Hall to the beautiful green environs that are the stock-in-trade of “3D Magazine.” Likewise, the Hall’s windows have been bookended once again by Dartmouth’s archetypal black shutters, and winding concrete pathways have been poured. Should the swarms of ’24s and ’25s stopping to gawk at Dartmouth Hall serve as any indication, these swift changes to beautify the exterior of the Hall have been much appreciated. Still, the population most appreciative is doubtless the graduating class, the ’22s, whose Commencement is no longer in danger of happening in front of a readily apparent construction site. However, construction in the interior of the Hall will continue during Commencement and throughout the summer, and Dartmouth Hall is slated to reopen by the 2022 fall term.

The present construction on Dartmouth Hall began in January 2021, and this $42-million refurbishment project was originally projected to last 18 months, although it will slightly exceed that estimate. The construction effort at large has consistently wrought an undesirable aesthetic effect, having presented Dartmouth students with something of an overt eyesore for the better part of the last year and a half. Even so, those students and alumni acquainted with Dartmouth history understand the necessity of such a project. Dartmouth Hall is perhaps the most historically important of Dartmouth edifices, and it has been the object of many a construction project through the years. 

As with most things at Dartmouth, the origins of Dartmouth Hall can be traced to the College’s founder, Eleazer Wheelock. Starting in 1770, Wheelock discussed plans for the College’s buildings with Comfort Sever, a carpenter from Albany, NY. In 1772, Sever provided a design for what was to be the first of these buildings—a design which apparently met with Wheelock’s approval—and by 1774 construction of a foundation had begun on the hill east of the Green. Most of the laborers involved in this undertaking, however, departed by 1775 to fight in the Revolutionary War, and shortly thereafter Wheelock drained his (British) funds and Dartmouth’s Trustees withdrew their support from the project. When Wheelock died in 1779, construction on Dartmouth Hall had yet to truly begin.

Wheelock’s son and Dartmouth’s second president, John Wheelock, was the man who oversaw the start of construction, which he did in 1784 with the aid of Comfort Sever. Though the elder Wheelock had conceived of a brick building, brick proved too expensive a material to acquire, and the ready availability of wood rendered it far too appealing an alternative for the financially strapped school which his son had inherited. Indeed, upon a stone foundation, workers in 1786 laid a frame consisting of New Hampshire pine and oak. This frame was covered in 1787, and, though incomplete, the building—promptly becoming known simply as “the College”—hosted Commencement that year. Finally completed in 1791, “the College” remained the entirety of the school’s infrastructure for the next forty years, playing host to all of Dartmouth’s classrooms, offices, common spaces, dining halls, and dormitories. When other buildings were constructed in the 1830s, the administration saw fit to rechristen “the College” as “Dartmouth Hall.”

There followed a good deal of vandalism, weather damage, and abject disrepair. In fact, the building’s reputation as a hazard became so great that it accrued a certain reputation, one which negatively affected undergraduate enrollment in the 1840s. While upgrades were completed after 1848 in order to rectify this enrollment issue, scant work was done to the building in the ensuing decades.

On February 18, 1904, the all-wood Dartmouth Hall erupted in flames; the building was destroyed in its entirety within a matter of hours. Alumni contributed to a sizable, two-year rebuilding effort, which (wisely) emphasized the use of brick as a building material and contained only classrooms and offices. However, another fire consumed Dartmouth Hall just over three decades later. On April 25, 1935, flames broke out which caused substantial interior damage to the building. Thereafter, the Trustees made the decision to fireproof the building, using concrete and steel, as it was being reconstructed in another two-year process.

It is this very building, unchanged for eighty-six years, which has been undergoing renovations since January of 2021. The Hall is receiving a complete, modernizing overhaul, though the Administration is correctly working to maintain its exterior appearance, which is and always will be a landmark of the College. While the wait may be long and the sights (hitherto) sore, students ought to be pleased that the Administration elected to complete this renovation. The Class of 2022 should be proud to be the first to benefit from it.

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Bibliography
Wade, Charles H. “The Construction of an Elite Identity: A Landscape History of Dartmouth Hall.” Material Culture 49, no. 2 (2017): 24–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44508456.