USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Hanover > Hanover, New Hampshire, a bicentennial book : essays in celebration of the town's 200th anniversary > Part 13
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Mrs. 1961 crosses Lebanon Street and continues up Main Street. The Dartmouth National Bank and Dartmouth Savings Bank have occupied this corner since Robinson Hall displaced them north of the Commons in 1913. The new addition occupies the site of the former Brock building. She can remember when the Rich Brothers store was there. She stops at Tanzi's for fresh vegetables, fresh fruits and a friendly (and possibly fresh) verbal exchange with Charles, Harriet and Harry Tanzi. Clyde Trum- bull's Hanover Hardware Co. replaces the hardware business of Thomas E. Ward (which was before this E. T. Ford's). Clyde is W. H. Trumbull's son. The brick buildings beyond to the north now belong to the Baptist Church (south part) and the A. W. Guyer Estate (northern section). Putnam's is still on the corner and enlarged to include the adjoining space where in days gone by have been Saia's Dartmouth Fruit Co., Willis Way, and others. She waves to Mr. Putnam discussing a problem with his son, Rich- ard, behind one of the counters. Overhead where H. H. H. Lan- gill was once is David Pierce, photographer. A group of high school students are leaving Lou (Bressett)'s restaurant where they have been discussing affairs of the day over cokes. Next is Co-
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burn's jewelry store which has descended from N. A. Frost, Edward Carter, Horace Hurlbutt, Harry Coburn, Mrs. Coburn, and Fred Michael to Edward C. Hill. Beyond this Mrs. Leroy Porter is busy taking an order for flowers. The Porters bought this business from Emerson Gardens in 1944. A group of skiers is gathered in Art Bennett's comparing notes on the latest ski news. College Supplies fills the corner-an outgrowth of the Typewriter Shop started by John Piane and A. D. Storrs. The next building was built by the College in 1936 to replace two small structures and bears the name of an early merchant, Lang. The lower floor is taken up by Campion's three stores. Since James Campion retired in 1929, James II has carried on the business (until 1936 where Dudley's store had been and from then on in the Lang building which he had helped to design). James III and Ronan, his sons, are now in the business. And a fourth James has just stopped in the store for a ride home from the third grade. Tony's barber shop has been in operation upstairs since the beginning of the building. An- thony Caccioppo married one of Angelo Tanzi's daughters, Ethel. He retired in 1957. Now the business is carried on by Jack Rob- erts who married another of Angelo Tanzi's daughters, Roxie.
Sharing the second floor is A. B. Gile Co., Inc. This has grown up from an agency started by N. A. Frost in 1887. At first it was in the jewelry store and then moved upstairs. In 1924 the agency was taken over by Archie Gile and Roy Brackett. Now it is in the hands of E. M. Cavaney and Jack Gile-Arch Gile's son-in-law and nephew.
The old watering trough and bulletin board are gone from the corner of the campus but welcome is still warm at the Hanover Inn with James McFate in charge.
Mrs. 1961 finally gets across the street to her car, gathers up a son from his Cub meeting, and drives home to thaw out her eve- ning meal.
Mrs. 2011 will think her very old-fashioned.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the contribution to this paper of research by Dr. Harry C. Storrs.
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II Victualing and Lodging by John Hurd
A® S early as 1772 Hanover, then a village of only twenty fam- ilies, could boast of one church and two taverns, but the Church of Christ, as its historians like to point out, pre- ceded the first tavern by a full eight months. One tavern was re- spectable; its proprietor, a solid citizen; but one tavern was dis- reputable; its proprietor, an enemy of the College and especially of President Wheelock.
The good tavern was located on the site of the Casque and Gauntlet House; the bad tavern, on what is now the lawn between Steele, the Chemistry building, and Wheeler Hall, the dormitory. The good proprietor was President Wheelock's agent and book- keeper, Captain Aaron Storrs. The disreputable proprietor was John Payne. President Wheelock had doubted that student use of liquor was compatible with the welfare of an Indian school. His skepticism proved to be well founded, for after the liquor license was granted, hardly a month elapsed before cooks got too drunk to prepare student meals. Wheelock's strong-handed attempts to stop the sale of liquor to all persons College-connected threw Hanover into a turmoil. To make matters worse, the Indians took to rum with disastrous results. In the guerilla warfare between Wheelock and Payne, the President kept a sharp eye out for viola- tions of the law and the tavern keeper broke down the college gates.
Narrowly speaking, Wheelock lost the battle, for although Gov- ernor Wentworth, to whom he appealed to cancel the license, promised help, the Governor was overruled by the Court, which not only renewed Payne's license but also granted one to another man named Charles Hill, who built as close to the college line in Lebanon as he could.
The situation worsened. President Wheelock had trouble in- volving his own sons with Payne, trouble with Hill, and trouble with a third tavern-keeper, John Sargeant, who ran an inn just across the river at the ferry in Norwich. The good tavern-keeper, Captain Storrs, had found competition tough, and in 1792 his
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property was sold to a young 1791 graduate of the College, Rufus Graves, who for the next decade was prominent as an enterprising businessman in the village. The behaviour of John Sargeant con- sequently came into stronger focus. Angered by what he thought were unfair business maneuvers about the ferry, he apparently re- taliated by selling liquor to students.
In the area where Town and Country and the Camera Shop are now located, Asa Holden opened a tavern in 1794. At his death in 1797 Deacon Benoni Dewey took it over and operated it as the "Coffee House" there until 1802, when he went to the Brewster tavern on the site of the Hanover Inn.
In the place where the Municipal Parking Lot is now situated a tavern was opened up in 1802 and continued under various names with many proprietors for seventy-five years. In its most prosperous era, 1821-1838, it was directed by Captain Ebenezer Symmes, who sold it in 1838 to Jonathan G. Currier. After leasing it first to Joseph Barber and second to Alvan Tubbs, Currier sold it to Horace Frary, who renamed it the Hanover Inn. This tavern changed names frequently. It had been known as the Union House and the American House before it became in 1858 the Hanover Inn. Still later it was called the Lower Hotel, easily rec- ognizable by the double piazzas running the entire length of the building with the main roof forming the roof of both piazzas. After a season of neglect it was bought by the College and turned into an unpopular dormitory for students. Then it became a tene- ment, and after the conflagration of the Dartmouth Hotel in 1887 it again became a sort of tavern until it too was destroyed by fire July 11, 1888.
The long and fascinating history of the present Hanover Inn goes all the way back to Brewster's Tavern. In 1778 Captain Ebe- nezer Brewster was called from Connecticut to become the college steward. As an inducement he was given the site of the present Inn where he first rented a wooden house to the east and then built a frame house for himself on the northwest corner of the lot. About 1782 he converted this home into a tavern, which he ran with such success that he took away the clientele of Captain Storrs across the street.
A small and "quite nice-looking colonial house," Brewster's Tavern dispensed liquor, and it created considerable worry in the minds of College authorities who anticipated a new source of danger to student integrity. In 1802 Brewster leased the tavern to
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Deacon Benoni Dewey, and it became known as Dewey's Coffee House. In 1813 Brewster's Tavern was moved by Brewster's son against his old father's wishes. Decoyed into visiting relatives in Haverhill, New Hampshire, Captain Brewster did not witness re- moval of the wooden building intact to the northeast corner of Main and Lebanon Streets, the site of the present bank, where it remained no longer as a tavern but as a private house until the bank was built in 1913. On the original site was soon erected the inn that became famous as the Dartmouth Hotel.
It is the Dartmouth Hotel (and its successor the Hanover Inn) which played the most important part in the local hotel history of the nineteenth century. It opened on September 14, 1814 with Robert Dyde and Company as landlords. The proprietors quar- reled in 1816, the house was closed, and the furniture offered for sale. Opened again in 1816 or 1817, it was kept by Captain E. D. Curtis and known as Curtis' Hotel. In 1821 Miss Rosina Fuller, a daughter of Deacon Caleb Fuller, took over. She married her bookkeeper and general factotum, Elam Markham, despite or per- haps because of his inability to keep clear and sound books. They ran a successful establishment until 1838 when the Dartmouth Hotel was purchased by Jonathan Currier, who kept it first for himself and then rented it to tenants until 1857.
The 1840's in Hanover were the period of the great horse teams and stableyards when sometimes as many as eight and even ten horses dragged huge loads of freight over the turnpikes. The ar- rival of the railroads in the 1850's altered that picturesque era.
Transportation locally was as inexpensive as food and drink. An account book kept by Hanover House in 1847 indicates that a man could buy a half-pint of brandy for $.13, a whole pint of rum for $.15, or one of gin for $.20. Two meals and two drinks ran the bill up to $.62. The Currier ledger kept from 1838 to 1850 shows that in the 1840's one could hire a horse and buggy to go to Nor- wich for $.38, to Lebanon for $.75, and to Woodstock for $3. If he were a visitor in town, he would be charged $.50 for keeping a horse for one day at hay and four quarts of oats.
Currier sold the hotel to Horace Frary, who during the next twenty years enlarged and improved the building at a cost esti- mated at $40,000. What life was like in the Dartmouth Hotel under the Frary regime we know from the reminiscences of Pro- fessor Edwin J. Bartlett, who lived there two years, 1879-1880, at a weekly cost of $6 for himself and another $6 for his wife. The
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$12 included two rooms, one on the campus side of the house, light, heat, food, and service. Besides transients, the hotel had eight resident guests and another eight who came in from without for food.
Physically the Dartmouth Hotel consisted of two four-storied barracks, one of brick with entrance on Main Street across from the Casque and Gauntlet House and the other of wood between the present Inn and Hopkins Center. The wooden annex had a huge store room at the front on the ground floor, which in earlier days was used for alumni dances and theatricals. The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience was presented one season when an un- usually large number of young summer people was in town.
In the main hotel, the spacious rooms upstairs forming with corridors the letter H were unheated during the winter except in the west wing. Introduced into the older part with huge painted radiators, steam heat was a doubtful blessing because the radiators knocked and hammered like riveting machines. Though fuel ex- isted in sufficient quantity, servants in those days were as reliable as they are today, and they did not seem to care that a guest re- coiled from the frostiness of the radiator and went his trembling way to seek warmth elsewhere.
If some eighty years ago you had asked for a room AND bath, Mrs. Horace Frary, the proprietor's wife, would have looked at you as though you were demented. The fact is that the hotel rooms had no plumbing. If you are fond of guessing, you may offer some unprovable solutions of the problem how the Dart- mouth Hotel guests kept clean, and almost surely one wrong an- swer is that they immersed themselves in a bathroom tub with hot water and soap as agents.
A stranger once did request a bath, and he was referred to Mrs. Frary. Such unrealistic arrogance could be handled only by the dry treatment of two speciously humble and rhetorical questions. "You want a bath? Didn't you see the river when you came up from the depot?"
Something less than luxurious, the dining room of the Dart- mouth Hotel, long, narrow, and dark, had only four windows, two opening on the alley in the rear and two on the ever-bleak recess between the main building and the annex. The floor was painted blue. The chairs were "kitchen," and the tables with three feet were little better than benches.
Better known as Hod, Mr. Frary was hotel keeper with a per-
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sonality so strong that many anecdotes are told about his conver- sation, appearance, and deportment. If he had silvery locks, soft speech, and saintly behavior, he also had a hot temper, violent language, and devilish forthrightness. Because "those damned stu- dents" made so much noise that he could not sleep, he tore down the hotel porch on the Main Street side. They used to dance clogs on it and madly yell his nickname, "HOD-HOD-HOD," and then run away.
Once when he was ailing, Mrs. Frary suggested that she send for Dr. Crosby. "Damn it," said Hod, "this is no time to send for a doctor. I'm sick." The humor underlying this anecdote lies in the fact that if a man were mildly sick Dr. Crosby would give him some pleasant medicine like Valerian or balsam of Peru but if he were seriously sick he would give not only physic but also emetic, not only cool his blood with saltpeter but also bleed him well.
In Hod's final illness when his breath was failing, his wife bent over him sympathetically. Were his final sentiments to be soft and loving? Into her ear he clipped his hard and practical consonants, "You make the damned old * * * * pay his bill."
In Memories and Anecdotes Kate Sanborn asks sententiously, "Who that ever saw Horace Frary could forget him?" If a devoted mother of a Dartmouth student owing to poor train service ar- rived late for luncheon, she had no chance of being given nourish- ment. With a minimum of charity and a maximum of forthright- ness Mr. Frary at the front door would pronounce, "Dinner is over long ago."
In some ways, however, Mr. Frary was adaptable and flexible. He would haggle for meat at the tailboard of a butcher's cart right outside the hotel. He cared personally for about thirty oil lamps, trimmed the wicks with his fingers, and then wiped them on his trousers. Standing at table in full view of the dining-room guests, he used to carve meats, and as he wiped the carving knife on the same trouser leg used for lamp-black residue, the streaks of red and black created colorful contrast and provided a subject of polite conversation except for the unobservant and the squeamish.
Utterly dissimilar from the present-day chic and smiling dining- room hostesses, in her old-fashioned plainness and grimness Mrs. Frary was also a conversational piece, a fitting helpmate for her husband. An autocrat in dining room and kitchen with her spare- ness and straightness, she cut her way through opposing space and through opposing guests. Slippers down at the heel, she shuffled,
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her eyes efficient and eagle, boring in on situations and diners. From one end of the kitchen to the other of the dining room she carried food and deposited it, warned and commanded, rebuked and reviled, but seldom smiled and comforted.
If today the customer is almost always right, under the Frary dictatorship the customer was almost always wrong. Guest num- ber 1 wants bread. Mrs. Frary: "What ails the biscuits this morn- ing? I made them myself." Guest number 2 makes a joke. To the intense and suppressed delight of all diners except the joker, Mrs. Frary in a loud and clear though flat voice dissects it. Guest num- ber 3 requests waitress to bring him hotter coffee. Mrs. Frary: "If he wants his coffee hot, he better come earlier to breakfast." Guest number 4, a traveling man, sends his food back as below standard. Mrs. Frary: "Hey! What ails it? Ain't it good enough for you?" and returns the plate unaltered. Guest number 4 lowers head and eats.
Habitually late and incorrigible guests were expelled. Squire William H. Duncan, and Mr. Nelson Alvin McClary of the book store were solemnly given sentences of an expulsion for perpe- tuity, a sentence later capriciously reduced to a week.
Even the charitable Professor Bartlett writing in 1921 with the soft focus of the years between him and the Frarys remarked, "It is difficult now to find a country hotel so free from the tasteful, the dainty, and the homelike. One would almost conclude that it was planned, furnished, and managed to drive guests to homes of their own."
Outside of the village of Hanover were two centers of popula- tion large enough to maintain a tavern. Hanover Center in the early days was strung out along a road for two miles or so with a handful of houses. As early as 1796 a store was constructed by the "parade ground," the name given to the rectangular parcel of land acquired by Hanover Center as the village green. After the store came a tavern kept by John Smith, later owned by Isaac C. Howard, which contained also the only public hall of the com- munity. Its loss by fire in 1851 was consequently regretted on two counts.
Hanover Center apparently had another tavern, for the town records show that the persons attending the town meeting in March 1793 had a liquor or coffee break when by vote the meet- ing adjourned for fifteen minutes to the house of Benjamin Hatch "to secure the refreshment offered by a tavern in those days."
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Etna, formerly called Mill Village or Mill Neighborhood or District Number Five, owed its existence to the series of water- falls in Mink Brook providing power for a grist mill and a saw- mill. Enough business and population developed to make possible the erection of a store in 1833 with a hall over it, which developed into two additions used as a hotel kept by Horace and Walter Buck. The building burned in 1922.
In Hanover history the inn on the river road between Hanover and Lyme looms much larger than the Smith Tavern of Hanover Center or the Buck Hotel of Etna. Formerly known as the Stone House or the Luther Wood Inn, this establishment in recent times has been called The Haunted House.
Born in 1800, Luther Wood, a wealthy resident of Lebanon, who married Amy Freeman, granddaughter of Hanover's first settler, Edmund Freeman, bought in 1832 for $2,500 some 175 acres of farm land along the Connecticut six miles from Hanover on the main Boston-to-Montreal Post Road, now known as the River Road to Lyme. Here he built a tavern.
Though soundly and even lavishly constructed, the Luther Wood Inn had a short life as a hostelry for four reasons: the Pas- sumpsic Railroad Company built a line through Norwich up the Connecticut and diverted traffic from the old Post Road; a new road to Lyme, essentially the one we use today, made the old Post Road obsolescent; Luther Wood died in 1858; and the Inn acquired early its reputation for being haunted. No one dared live in it and no one would buy it. A strange knock-knock-knock could be heard distinctly by night, and even occasionally by day sounded a tap-tap-tap.
Two versions exist about the origin of the ghost. He was a mys- terious and old companion, presumably male, of a hired man named Lyman Murdock who lived in a small cabin south of the inn. One day the old companion disappeared, and later the ghost returned to haunt the scenes of his earthly life.
More romantic and consequently more popular, the second story concerns a peddler who got drunk in the taproom one night and boasted of his money. Next morning he had vanished into river air. It was believed that after a terrific fight he had been murdered in the parlor and that his corpse had been hoisted through the window next to the fireplace and thrown into the Connecticut. Relying not very heavily on either logic or folklore, this legend accounts for the architectural peculiarity of one win-
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dow being bricked over to leave its companion window in im- balance. The room itself was never used again.
In the 1890's a man fearing neither devil nor ghost moved into the abandoned Stone House and began to rehabilitate it. Stephen Chase conceived the romantic plan of arranging a dance in the top-floor ballroom against the background of fallen plaster and kerosene lamps.
Complete with four horses and a colorful and eccentric driver, Old Dud, the old Concord coach of the Norwich Railroad Station transported laughing and skeptical couples over the darkened River Road.
At midnight above the noise of shush-shushing dancers' feet and music came again the unmistakable KNOCK-KNOCK- KNOCK which shook the floor and froze the dancers in their gaiety. TAP-TAP-TAP: the Ghost was slowly climbing the stairs. Girls sought inadequate refuge in partners' arms, and men had the courage of cornered caterpillars.
On such abject terror, the tenant took pity. Grinningly he led the trembling guests two flights down and out to a shed. To con- jure up the ghost he used not a wand, not a muttered incantation, but only a mute fan. On the wall over a large, old-fashioned nail hung a grain winnower shaped like a giant dust pan. In motion, the fan, like any breeze, would cause the winnower to sway on the nail as pivot and pound the wall for a KNOCK-KNOCK- KNOCK. As the momentum subsided, could be heard the TAP- TAP-TAP. With pounding hearts some girls may have sympa- thized with the now non-existent ghost.
As handsome a house as it was solid, the Luther Wood Inn must have been one of the show places of New Hampshire about the middle of the nineteenth century, but today few persons know much about it. Indeed the main source of information is a thesis done for a Dartmouth art course in 1937 by Dana Doane Johnson with photographs by Ralph Brown and Professor Hugh S. Morri- son of The Haunted House in disrepair.
Architecturally an excellent example of Greek revival style, the nearly square main structure with its full classic face of four Doric columns and a weighty pediment was something to delight the eyes of weary travelers. The stone of which it was constructed, a local hornblende schist, had been floated down the river on rafts from a northern town and dragged in eight hundred feet to the building site. White slabs of solid granite framed the windows
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and doors, and large granite plinths supported the wooden col- umns. The massive floor beams and roof frames were hand-hewn timber.
The third-floor ballroom, 361/2 by 22 feet, extended the full depth of the house and out into the pediments which topped the Doric colonnade of the first two stories. Such festive emphasis is all the more remarkable because originally the Inn had only four bedrooms on the second floor. Perhaps the farther away from puritanical Hanover an inn was located, the more country people would gravitate towards lights, music, and dancing.
As late as 1921 the Luther Wood House was still in good enough condition to be bought by Miguel Rabassa for $5,000, but it could not survive vandalism. Windows were broken, doors re- moved, panelling cut up, and floor boards were pried up and carted off. The only relics of the Luther Wood Inn are now the stone slabs taken from it to form the foundation of the Lutheran Church built in 1958 on Summer Street, Hanover.
The most dramatic event in Hanover hotel history occurred on the night of January 4, 1887 with the mercury registering some 20 degrees below zero. At 2 A.M. a fire broke out in the Dart- mouth Hotel and raged out of control for seven hours. By nine o'clock it had destroyed the chief corner of the village and the east side of Main Street. Had there been wind instead of breath- less stillness, most of the village would have gone up in smoke and sparks.
After the Dartmouth Hotel burned, the trustees of Dartmouth College had a major problem on their hands. Where could alumni and guests be housed? The hotel's owner, a non-resident, did not care to rebuild. After buying the corner lot for $5,000 and deliberating a year, the College trustees took the plunge. In March 1888 they voted to build a hotel with accommodations for a hundred guests at a cost of not more than $25,000, though the cost rose to $37,500 and finally to $41,940. Begun in March 1888, the building was ready for Commencement guests in 1889. Re- named The Wheelock, for several years it was sometimes run by a lessee and sometimes by a manager appointed by the College, rarely to the satisfaction of the public and usually with a financial loss.
The architect, the contractor, the workmen, and the trustees of Dartmouth College ran into one difficulty after another. Townspeople stole lumber during the night in such quantities
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