USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Hanover > Hanover, New Hampshire, a bicentennial book : essays in celebration of the town's 200th anniversary > Part 14
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that the contractor offered to give it to them free if they would only ask for it ahead of time.
Samuel Gilman Tucker, who was to manage the hotel, exceeded his authority by running up some $850 worth of unauthorized alterations. He refused to pay the contractor, who had him ar- rested when the trustees would not accept the responsibility. To protect themselves the trustees sued the contractor. The chimneys would not draw. Fire broke out around one fireplace the first time it was used. The middle portions of the hotel settled badly. The flues were faultily and dangerously constructed. Studding of upper floors was unsatisfactory. Unseasoned wood caused excessive cracking of walls in upper rooms and distortions of doorways.
So unsound and so inadequate was The Wheelock that in twelve years it had to be altered and improved so radically that the costs of reconstruction amounted to more than the original costs. The reconstructed Wheelock of 1902 became the Hanover Inn of 1961.
In hotel history hardly anyone has kind words to say about The Wheelock, but the responses to the Hanover Inn from 1902 to the present have ranged all the way from lukewarm at the worst to ecstatic at the best. Alumni who bring their brides to the Hanover Inn are able to dream their dreams and live them simultaneously, a state of mind not always understood by brides without Dart- mouth connections. The Coffee Shop and the cocktail lounge have helped to prolong contentment, to arouse enthusiasm, and even to stimulate emotional elevation to poetic heights.
Not long out of Dartmouth, Arthur Perry Fairfield took over the Hanover Inn management in 1905 and continued until his re- tirement in 1936. The Fairfield era was the hey-day of elderly widows and spinsters of superior tastes, impeccable backgrounds, and passionate dislike of loud noises. Quiet, aloof, and deferential to the older generation, Mr. Fairfield never warmed up to student patronage.
Better known to undergraduates was Lon Gove, his clerk, with so much color and personality that he has been described as a Dartmouth Institution, the Official Welcomer-Back, and the Daddy of Dartmouth Boys.
Thoroughly imbued with Dartmouth traditions, Lon Gove was commonly believed by Dartmouth men to be a Dartmouth man, which he was not, and by some Harvard men (he could speak Bos- tonian when he wanted) to be Harvard, and by some Yale men to
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be Yale (he was trilingual and could also speak New Haven). In his younger days he played football for Dartmouth, so the story goes, when the Green, a little short of talent, needed help in a tight spot.
A short, heavy-set man, Lon wore a derby hat cocked at an angle, affected a black eye-glass ribbon draped over his left ear, smoked incessantly cigarettes protruding well out into space from an ebony holder, and with a broad and big-toothed smile charmed away the most irascible moods. About him Bill Cunningham wrote two articles years apart and said, "He was great not in the sense of money or power or influence or position . . . but in his simplicity, the sweetness of his character, and the absolute com- pleteness with which he filled his role in life."
The Sayre era was brilliant. Skiers of the 1930s can recall the engaging hospitality with which Ford and Peggy Sayre at the Ra- vine Camp on Moosilauke handed out hot coffee and their own fried doughnuts. After the camp burned in September 1935, Ford and Peggy as managers of the Hanover Inn beginning May 1936 handed out to guests more than doughnuts and coffee.
Human, dynamic, shy, but always direct, Ford with Peggy's help made the Hanover Inn the attractive gateway to Dartmouth and the White Mountains and the center of Dartmouth Winter Carnivals. The fame of the Sayre buffet suppers before which stu- dents (and others) starved themselves for two days spread beyond New England. And beyond New England spread also the fame of the Hanover ski school with headquarters at the Inn. At one time the only ski school of its kind in the United States, it was attended for a week each year by some fifty boys and girls between the ages of eight and thirteen.
If at twenty-five Ford Sayre was old enough to take over the Han- over Inn, at thirty-five he was too young to die, a captain in the Army Air Force in a plane crash near Spokane, Washington. His name is perpetuated in the Ford K. Sayre Memorial Fund bene- fiting Hanover youngsters aspiring to become good skiers. After his death Peggy filled in as manager.
James T. McFate became manager in 1953. A big man, dom- inating by his physical presence coffee shop, lobby, and dining room, he is easily recognizable by guests. The popularity of the Hanover Inn seems to be constantly increasing with its terrace restaurant, outdoor grill presided over by a chef with a tall white hat, and air-conditioned cocktail lounge with its Paul Sample
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Crosby house (now Crosby Hall) built 1810
House in transit in 1928 from North Main Street to Chase Road
FIN & BOLLOW FARE
Main Street in the 186os; east side looking north, showing the Tontine
Main Street 1868; west side looking north from the present site of the Precinct Building
M.MAMAR
Main Street about 1898; west side looking south
The "Lower Hotel," burned 1888, on the site of the municipal parking lot
DARTMOUTH - HOTEL.
Dartmouth Hotel; a drawing by John Willard, March 25, 1826. Willard resided in Hanover 1824-26, employed in the store of his uncle, Dr. Samuel Alden.
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DAR'T YOL TH HOTEL
Dartmouth Hotel 1865
Victualing and Lodging
mural of a ski jumper. For Mr. McFate and future managers Hop- kins Center provides opportunities for creative efforts to give Hanover a hostelry combining the simplicity of a country inn with the sophistication of an aristocratic urban residential hotel.
With the arrival of the 1960's and the approach of the 1970's, and emphasis on focal transfer point and mobility, Hanover hums with more activity than it did in the nineteenth century. The re- built Vermont and New Hampshire roads, the increased popu- larity of skiing and the Dartmouth Skiway and the ski school in Lyme Center, summer golf and summer schools, the educational and recreational facilities of Hopkins Center, the competitive flamboyance of Dartmouth athletes, the year-round conventions and carnivals and music festivals, improved airplane service and the improved West Lebanon airport, the persistent nostalgia of Dartmouth graduates to return to the scenes of their studies and sports-these are some of the reasons why new hotels, inns, and motels are dotting the highways and byways. Supplementary to the Hanover Inn are its own Motor Lodge on Lebanon Street, newly opened this year, and the Green Lantern Inn, Occom Lodge, and Blue Spruce Lodge, all in Hanover; the Norwich Inn and Mo- tel across the river; and the Keenes' in Etna. The Chieftain, the Ledges, Rolling Hill, Sunset, Marbridge all have plenty of winter heat and parking space, and some serve continental breakfasts.
So long as the number of automobiles and public and private planes increases yearly, one is hardly rash in suggesting that de- mands for "victualing and lodging accommodations" in the Han- over area will keep on increasing.
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I 2 Personages and Eccentrics by Francis Lane Childs
A COMPREHENSIVE survey of the large number and great variety of individuals who simply by living in it have given shape and quality to a town two centuries old would necessitate a volume of no mean size. This chapter makes no pretense in that direction; it purposes merely to bring before the reader certain citizens of the past, great or small, saints or sin- ners, who for one reason or another seem worth calling to mind. Many others equally interesting could have been included had space permitted.
Throughout the eighteenth century the most prominent and influential citizen of Hanover, apart from the officers of the Col- lege, was Jonathan Freeman. Born in 1745, he came here from Mansfield, Conn., in 1765 with his elder brother Edmund, the first permanent settler in the township, followed soon after by three younger brothers, all to become men of local distinction. A surveyor as well as farmer, Jonathan had assisted brother Edmund in the original survey and "lotting" of the town for the proprie- tors; in 1771 he ran the division line between the properties of Wheelock and the College and laid out the village on the Plain, with fine foresight centering it around the "Green." During his lifetime he served in most of the town offices-moderator, auditor, town clerk, selectman, and treasurer-and as a member of count- less town committees. An active participant throughout the con- troversy over the New Hampshire Grants, he represented Han- over in the conventions upon the grants from 1776 to 1781 and in the General Assembly of Vermont in the unions of 1778 and 1781. After the troubles were over, he labored hard to bring about har- mony between the towns involved and the New Hampshire legis- lature.
He served two brief enlistments in the Revolution with the rank of lieutenant and was one of Hanover's Committee of Safety and of several committees to raise soldiers. He was the town's del- egate to the New Hampshire convention to ratify the Constitution of the United States in 1788, and to the State Constitutional Con-
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vention in 1791. A firm Federalist, he served as representative 1788-92, member of the council 1789-96, and state senator 1789-94. In 1793 he was chosen a presidential elector and proudly cast his ballot for General Washington. He was elected a member of Con- gress from New Hampshire in 1797 and reelected in 1799, a dis- tinction achieved by only one other Hanover resident (James W. Patterson in 1863 and 1865).
Always a good friend to the College, he became its "financier" in 1789, in charge of the management and disposal of the College lands, and in 1793 a member of the Board of Trustees. Both these positions he held until his death in 1808 at his home in Hanover Center. He had accumulated a considerable property and raised a large family of able sons and daughters. Marked by a sound busi- ness sense and a painstaking management of all affairs entrusted to him, he won and kept the respect of his fellow-townsmen.
During this same period Hanover Center also provided a man even more widely known for his misdemeanors and vices than was Freeman for his accomplishments and virtues. Stephen Burroughs came there at the age of six in 1772 with his father, Rev. Eden Burroughs, first minister of the Center church. In 1797 he pub- lished in Hanover his autobiography under the sensation-promis- ing title Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs: Con- taining Many Incidents in the Life of this Wonderful Man Never Before Published, a book that became immensely popular throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, with cheap stereotyped editions appearing frequently from presses in various cities and towns as far west as St. Louis. Well written and inter- esting, much in the manner of the lesser picaresque novels of its time, it recounts Stephen's infamous escapades from his childhood to his thirtieth year. Although undoubtedly exaggerated in many instances, in the main the facts wherever they can be checked prove to be true. Except for some long-winded passages of pseudo- philosophic reflection, the narrative remains entertaining reading to this day.
Ever rebellious against discipline and law, Burroughs shows himself to be, as he has been called, "the type of the Eternal Scamp." A mischief-maker as a boy, a runaway enlistee into the Revolutionary army at the age of fourteen from which his father soon obtained his release, a troublesome undergraduate at Dart- mouth for a year until expelled in 1782, he went on from such juvenile delinquency into a career of petty crime. Posing under
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various false names, he impersonated a ship's doctor on a lugger trip to France, a preacher (using ten sermons purloined from his father) in Pelham, Mass., a philanderer everywhere, and a school teacher in Massachusetts and on Long Island. His most serious offenses were his activities as one of a gang of counterfeiters. Sev- eral times imprisoned-once for three years on Castle Island in Boston Harbor-he broke jail as frequently. Yet through it all he emerges from the pages of his book as somehow an engaging rascal.
He returned to Hanover in 1795 with a wife and three children and managed his father's farm for three and a half years, when after a serious quarrel with his parents he departed for Canada. Briefly a resident at Shipton and Stanstead in the province of Quebec, he resumed his business of counterfeiting United States currency and distributed it in New England through the hands of agents. The Dartmouth Gazette of Oct. 14, 1807 reports his arrest with large amounts of spurious bills found in his home in Stan- stead and his removal to Montreal for trial. Little that is definite is known of his life thereafter. About 1810 he settled in Three Rivers, Quebec, where he was converted to Catholicism and is said to have reformed sincerely and permanently, becoming a successful school teacher there until his death in 1840. One daugh- ter became a nun of the Ursuline order, one son a respectable lawyer in Quebec City, and another a prosperous merchant in Montreal.
The Burroughs reputation in Hanover was saved, however, by Stephen's sister Irene. Married to Richard Foster, a farmer on the old Burroughs homestead at the Center, she became the mother of one daughter and ten sons. Two of the sons died in infancy, but seven of the remaining eight graduated from Dartmouth between 1837 and 1851, and six of those became ministers. The family was always in narrow circumstances, and it took great sacrifice by the parents and hard labor by the sons to get them through college. Mrs. Foster's innate love of learning and her determination that her children should all receive a broad education was the chief stimulant to their progress. Throughout all the years that the sons were in college, they brought home each week books from the library for their mother to read, to the amazement of her neighbors, who asserted that by the time the youngest son was graduated "Mrs. Foster had read every book in the Dartmouth College library!"
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In the first half of the nineteenth century the dominant per- sonage in Hanover was Mills Olcott, Esq. No one surpassed him in influence, in wealth, or in social position. Graduated from Dartmouth in 1790 at the age of sixteen, he spent five years in business training under his father in Vermont, then studied law, was admitted to the bar and began to practice. In 1800 he settled in Hanover at the north end of the College Green and at once became a leader in town affairs. A sound and brilliant lawyer and a clear-headed business man, he accumulated a tidy fortune. Land investments, the development of the White River Falls Co. (see Chapter 3), the presidency of the Grafton County Bank, and similar enterprises contributed to his success. An old-line Feder- alist, he sat as delegate from New Hampshire at the Hartford Convention in 1814. With great political sagacity, he was looked up to by his fellow-citizens as their natural leader in govern- mental matters, yet he never sought any office for himself except that of representative to the General Court. A devoted friend and counselor to the College during the trying days of the early part of the century, he served as its treasurer 1816-22 and as trustee from 1821 to his death in 1845.
Tall, portly and handsome, with a large forehead and deep-set blue eyes, he dressed immaculately. His commanding presence, fine voice, and rare gift of expression made him the natural choice of his fellow-citizens to preside over important public occasions such as all Fourth of July celebrations, the visit to Hanover of President Monroe, and the public dinner to Governor Clinton. He was a willing supporter of all worthy community enterprises and a generous donor to college and church; his private benefac- tions to individuals in distressed circumstances are reported to have been large indeed. Even his bitterest political opponents never attacked his personal character. His three sons and his five sons-in-law were all Dartmouth graduates, and all but one (Dr. Edward Olcott) became lawyers.
Although Olcott's most distinguished sons-in-law were Rufus Choate and Joseph Bell of Boston, a third, William H. Duncan (Dartmouth 1830) was a long-time resident of Hanover, a famil- iar, beloved, and eccentric figure on Main Street from his settle- ment here in 1838, when he came as assistant in business and legal affairs to the aging Mr. Olcott, to his death in 1883. Every- one in the village and the College called him "Squire Duncan." He was a scholarly man, well versed in the law, but provided with
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ample inherited means and endowed with an easy-going nature, he took only minor cases, which however he prosecuted with earnestness and skill. It is related that once when he had lost a case for a Norwich client, he returned to Hanover in a downcast mood and said to a friend who inquired about the result, "If there is any one thing in the world which God Almighty might be supposed not to know, it is the finding of a Vermont jury."
He was a staunch Democrat, the leader of his party, which for the greater part of his life was a distinct minority in the town. A stirring and accomplished orator, he was chosen to preside on many important occasions. For more than twenty-five years he acted as chief marshal at commencements and was as well known to Dartmouth alumni as to Hanover residents.
His wife was a semi-invalid, and after her death in 1851, he removed from the Olcott house to the old Dartmouth Hotel, where he was the star boarder for more than thirty years. A hand- some man, tall, with long curly hair, he was a Beau Brummel in dress, seldom appearing in public without a gray top hat and long black cloak. He took great delight in meeting the distin- guished College guests who came to the hotel, and they in turn were pleased to find in him a charming conversationalist and lively story-teller, with the gracious manners of a perfect gentle- man.
His law office consisted of one large room over Cobb's store on Main Street and despite his personal spotlessness was always ex- tremely untidy. He never threw anything away, and books, pa- pers, and miscellaneous articles piled up on chairs, tables, and floor until there was left only a path from the door around the central stove to his desk; the unwashed windows allowed little light to penetrate. Rarely he attempted a little cleaning. One day he came down the stairs and growled to Deacon Downing, "I am in a towering rage; I have had Mrs. Carlisle at my room to clean up a little and I can't find a damned thing."
The nineteenth century woman who left the deepest imprint on Hanover society was a small, thin, plain and modest spinster, Miss Theodosia Stockbridge. Left an orphan in childhood she made her home at Andover, Mass., with her aunt, the widow of President Francis Brown of Dartmouth, until 1840, when the Brown family came to Hanover on the appointment of Samuel Gilman Brown as professor of oratory and belles lettres in the College. She remained here until 1867, when she accompanied
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Professor Brown's family to Clinton, N. Y., upon his accession to the presidency of Hamilton College, and in 1881 to Utica. She taught music for many years in the private girls' schools of Han- over with marked success.
But it is not for this that Miss Stockbridge is remembered. Deeply religious and earnestly devoted to the welfare of boys, she conceived the idea of gathering on Sunday afternoons in the red brick schoolhouse at the corner of Wheelock and School Streets for moral and religious instruction a class of boys between the ages of eight and eighteen who were not attendants at church or Sunday school. She also collected and maintained a small library for their use. This class she kept up for twelve years, until her re- moval from town; over 150 boys were enrolled in it. In the words of Dorrance B. Currier, one of the lads in her original class: "No woman in our village ever exerted a like influence for good. She gathered the rough boys of our village about her from Sabbath to Sabbath and taught them the Scriptures. She began the work from a sense of duty and continued it as a work of love. She found in each boy that which she sought, and she sought for the good in them ... she unwittingly taught us to fear God and to worship Miss Stockbridge. The source of her influence was her perfect honesty, charity, and sympathy, and she won the love and respect of every boy in the village."
In 1894 a group of public-spirited men and women organized in Hanover a boys' club and named it the Stockbridge Association in Theodosia's honor. The name was suggested by John C. Paige of Boston, one of her original "boys," who on his death in 1897 left the Association a bequest of $4000, supplemented by $3000 more on the death of his mother, Mrs. Ann C. Paige of Hanover, in 1900. The Association was incorporated in 1898 and in 1909 bought of the Precinct the old brick building in which the club had been meeting rent free for ten years, and renamed it Stock- bridge Hall. The ownership of this hall was retained until April 2, 1960, when the Trustees sold it to the Christian Science Society. The Association was very successful in its work for boys, with a paid superintendent for many years. It sponsored the Boy Scouts on their organization here and gradually merged its work with theirs. In recent years the Trustees of the Association have di- vided the income from its invested funds among the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and recreational activities for the youth of the town.
Miss Stockbridge died in Utica April 10, 1904 in her eighty-fifth
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year, and at her request was buried in Hanover. At her funeral President Tucker called her "a saint of Hanover," and eight mem- bers of her class of forty years before bore her from the old White Church to her last resting-place in the Dartmouth Cemetery. No one now living in Hanover remembers Theodosia Stockbridge personally, but her name continues among us and her influence has never ceased.
Two men whose fame was won long after they removed from Hanover deserve at least brief mention here. One, Charles Ran- som Miller, the son of a farmer, was born in 1849 in the North Neighborhood in the house which is now the Rennie Nursing Home. He spent his childhood and youth here, until his gradua- tion from Dartmouth in 1872. Then he entered upon a life of journalism, with the remarkable record of forty years (1883-1922) as editor-in-chief of The New York Times, regarded every- where as one of the truly great American newspapermen of this century.
The other was Levi P. Morton, who attained celebrity as an extremely successful merchant, international banker, U. S. con- gressman, Minister to France 1880-84, Vice-President of the United States under Benjamin Harrison 1889-93, Governor of New York 1895-97, millionaire and philanthropist. The son of a country minister, he was unable to fulfil his ambition to go to col- lege and became a clerk in a small store at the age of sixteen. In 1843, when only nineteen, he came to Hanover as manager of a branch store for a Concord firm, which he opened in the old Tontine on Main Street. Successful from the start, he was able to buy out the store two years later, to enlarge it to four times its original size and to continue it until 1849, when he sold out and removed to Boston. While here, he had cleared over $12,000 profit, he had had his name painted on the largest sign ever dis- played on Main Street, stretching half way along the Tontine front, and he had attracted trade from Vermont by paying the bridge tolls for all customers who crossed the river, and from the countryside around by eye-catching advertisements in the local press. McElroy, in his biography of Morton, says: "In Hanover, he was the pioneer of modern business advertising methods." He boarded during all of his six years in town in Professor Sanborn's home (on the present site of Robinson Hall), and the association with that family was almost the equivalent of the college educa- tion he had missed. He ever held Hanover and the Sanborns in
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affectionate memory. Outliving most of his generation, he died in Ellerslie, N. Y., on his ninety-sixth birthday, May 16, 1920.
The oldtime stage drivers were important, useful and generally picturesque persons in the community. Two of them who were residents of Hanover for over fifty years merit commemoration here-Ira B. Allen (1815-1890) and Jason Dudley (1812-1895). In his younger days Allen had driven stage on the turnpike routes, skilfully and safely, but after the advent of the railroad made the stages obsolescent, he turned to the livery business, establishing a large stable west of Main Street where the Dartmouth Printing Company and Inn Garage now are, with access to it by a nar- row lane, since extended to become Allen Street, which thus per- petuates his name. He had a good sense of humor and the gift of witty expression, even when drunk, and he was in that condition more often than sober. His capable wife oversaw the business when he was incapacitated and proved as efficient at it as he.
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