USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Hanover > Hanover, New Hampshire, a bicentennial book : essays in celebration of the town's 200th anniversary > Part 25
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In establishing the new library Hanover took advantage of the New Hampshire Library Act of 1891 which granted up to $100 to any town which to the satisfaction of the State Library Commis- sion provided for "the care, custody and distribution of books furnished" by the grant, and itself appropriated not less than $50 if the town's last assessed valuation exceeded a million.
Prof. Charles F. Richardson of Dartmouth, Asa W. Fellows and Horace F. Hoyt were elected the first library trustees at the Town Meeting in March 1898 and noted in their first report: "The Hanover Free Library was opened to the public Feb. 4, 1899. More than fifty people were present on the opening day and the library has been well patronized. The books belonging to the Etna Library were consolidated with the books furnished by the town and state, making a total of about 400 volumes, with Thomas W. Praddex as librarian. The state donation consisted of one hun- dred well-chosen volumes of an aggregate net value of one hun- dred dollars: about fifty volumes, including the latest and most useful cyclopaedia, were purchased from the town appropriation; and Mr. Edward P. Storrs generously donated books to the amount of ten dollars, besides enabling the trustees to purchase other works on very advantageous terms." Mr. Storrs was owner of the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover.
The Town assessment for the library that year was $151.50 and the total library budget came to $110.11.
Housed in Hayes Hall over "Charley's" Store, the library was the recipient of many gifts of books and magazines and also pur- chased books from its funds allocated by the Town. Mr. Praddex noted in 1900 "continued interest in the success of the Library" and that a catalogue of books had been made. "We very much need," he wrote, "a more convenient room for the better accom-
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modation of the library and the patrons, but at present no such room seems to be obtainable."
The Selectmen were not unaware of the library's housing prob- lem and by December 1902 an appropriation of $1,500 for a new building had been turned over to Mr. Hoyt, treasurer of the Building and Permanent Improvement Fund. This, with $500 for a book fund, was a generous contribution and seems to have been invested with or through Dartmouth College at four percent in- terest. "The plan for the library building has been accepted by the trustees and materials are being purchased with the intention of having the building completed and ready by September 1, 1904," Mr. Hoyt reported in Town Meeting. Things did not move quite so fast, however, and in 1905 the town was asked "to raise a sum not exceeding six hundred dollars (in addition to the present building fund) for the purpose of enabling the trustees . . . to erect a brick library building."
The lot for the new library had been purchased in 1903 from A. N. Merrill for fifty dollars (with a slight return when he paid the trustees a dollar in 1904 for grass cut on the still empty land). Felicitously, Robert Fletcher, professor of engineering at the Thayer School, happened to be a member of the board of trustees and drew up plans for the new building for the nominal sum of nine dollars. The library was completed in 1905 and the full ac- count of its construction may be found in the report of the trus- tees, Mr. Hoyt, Prof. Fletcher and Chandler P. Smith, to the Town Meeting of 1906.
They observe that after the decision to build with brick there was $2,100 available, with interest accrued. An architect's fee and a contractor's profit would have taken "too large a share of the amount, hence the trustees themselves made the plans and bought the materials and superintended the work. The best materials were procured, the workmanship is first-class throughout, and it is believed that there will be little or no need of repairs for years to come." Time has proved this prophecy to be right.
The final cost of the building and its fireproof vault was $2,822.11 and the deficiency between this and the amount avail- able was more than made up by donations and the sale of ma- terials. "Loyal friends and citizens" furnished the twenty-five by thirty-three foot one-room interior which was finished throughout in varnished hazelwood. On a solid granite foundation, its double walls are brick "from an extra good lot at the Lebanon yard." Cut
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granite steps and portico were gifts from Henry C. Whipple in memory of John Wright Dodge who for years owned the store under the old Town Hall.
In accepting the library for the town, Mr. Storrs, chairman of the Selectmen, said when the cornerstone was laid: "It is only right that this institution should be located where it is for, as is well known, the western part of the town is amply provided through the College and the Howe Free Library for its Neighbor- hood, and here will be found a fitting close to the chain of Li- braries of which Hanover can well be proud."
Four years later librarian Praddex reported that "interest in the library is maintaining ... and notwithstanding the population in this vicinity is not materially increasing in numbers, the num- ber of books loaned still holds good and is on the increase."
By 1959 loans had increased to 1,313 books and 194 magazines, with 126 card holders. Monthly visits of the State Bookmobile now augment the library's own stock of 3,633 volumes and fifteen magazines and approximately one hundred records and record albums.
Mr. Praddex completed his service in 1910 and was succeeded by his wife, Mrs. Julia Jeanette Waterman Praddex, who was fol- lowed by Mrs. Frank G. Emerson. Miss Kathryna E. Spencer, like Mr. Praddex, was librarian for eighteen years, 1935-1953, followed by Mrs. Corliss C. Greenwood, Mrs. Richard H. Abbott and, in 1960, Miss Faith Stanley.
In 1900 in the "western part of the town," something over a century and a quarter after Eleazar Wheelock ordered 30,000 feet of good boards to be sent downriver from Thomas Johnson of Newbury, Vt., to build "a decent and convenient house for two families," his old home was given by its then owner, Miss Emily Hitchcock Howe, to serve all the people of Hanover as the Howe Library.
The founder of Dartmouth and his family had been miserably housed until in 1773 he commissioned a journeyman carpenter, one Hezekiah Davenport who came from Connecticut "on a ven- ture with tools and workmen," to build for him the dwelling which for the next sixty-five years would be known as the "Whee- lock Mansion." As mansions go it was modest, but the first of its kind to be erected in the wilderness of the Hanover Plain. Of narrow clapboard, with minimal decoration, it rose two stories
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and gambrel roof on the slope where Reed Hall now stands. Its walls were raised broadside and the tremendous effort of lifting the east side was reported so great that some of the striving men had nosebleeds. Wheelock gave its dimensions as forty-six feet deep by thirty-six wide and the George Ticknor drawing of 1803 shows the house as a four-chimneyed building with a facade chaste to austerity, four windows in its basement, four on the ground floor with five above and three dormers. A flight of steps led up to a simple entry. The clapboards, beveled and shaved away, overlap in the method of eighteenth century construction about two or three inches at their joinings. Beams, still visible in the cellar, are heavy white oak, the rest of the construction of pine. Each side of a wide central hallway, from which stairs led to the upper floors, there were evidently two large and two small rooms on the ground floor, with three bedrooms and a storeroom on each side of the second floor and a backstairs to the right hand apartment. Not only could the Mansion house two families comfortably (and did, until 1884), but it was also "capable of furnishing several comfortable rooms for students." It was sufficiently "covered" in time to accommodate the commencement exercises of August 25, 1773 and the Wheelocks moved in on November 18, though the house was far from finished.
Here Eleazar Wheelock died on April 24, 1779 leaving "to Mrs. Mary my loving wife, the use and improvement of such a part of my dwelling house and barn and other buildings as she shall find occasion for, for her use and comfort in life," and to his son John, who succeeded him as president, title to the property.
Mrs. Mary died in 1783 and three years later John Wheelock brought home his bride, gently reared Maria de Mallville Suhm, daughter of the Governor of the Danish Virgin Islands and step- daughter of Gen. Lucas Van Beverhoudt of Beverwyk, Troy Hills, N. J. Mrs. John, "knowing the life of a Government House in the tropics, of a European Court, of the lavish luxury and hospitality of Beverwyk and of the best society of New York," was something of a bright exotic in this northern village as she presided over the Wheelock Mansion where, in 1817, "in the midst of a brilliant circle of ladies" she entertained President James Monroe and re- newed with gently romantic nostalgia an acquaintance begun years earlier in New Jersey during the Revolution.
In 1813 her daughter Maria was married to the Rev. William Allen and four years later President John Wheelock died in the
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midst of the Dartmouth College-University battle, to be succeeded by his son-in-law. The Allens, with Madam Wheelock, occupied the Mansion through his brief term as president of Dartmouth University, moving to Brunswick, Me., in 1820 on his appoint- ment to the presidency of Bowdoin College.
From Bowdoin President Allen maintained through his agent in Hanover, Col. Amos Avery Brewster, a solicitous, sometimes irascible, absentee landlordism over the Mansion for the next seventeen years. His voluminous correspondence with Brewster (whose wife was the daughter of Madam Wheelock's half-sister) shows the Mansion rented in 1821 to a William Smith Esq., prob- ably of Bradford, Vt., who in lieu of unpaid rent was finally per- suaded to paint the building "a tinge of yellow" before it was occupied in the spring of 1824 by a new tenant, Bennett Tyler, fifth president of Dartmouth College. The Rev. Nathan Lord, who succeeded Tyler as president, occupied the Mansion from 1828 to 1830, and in 1831, on the suggestion of President Allen's son Wheelock, it was rented to a Mrs. Zabina Carrington who was "in the habit of taking students as boarders and roomers."
In 1837 the expanding college needed the land on which the old building stood and in July a committee was appointed "to bargain with Col. Brewster ... for the purchase of the Wheelock Mansion House if it can be obtained for Three Thousand dollars as proposed by President Allen." Allen had noted ten years earlier that "a college building standing where the house now is and southerly would be finely situated; and I cannot think but the Trustees will be anxious to purchase," but the trustees were in no position to take action at that time.
On September 25, 1837, agreeable to President Allen's instruc- tions, Col. Brewster sold "at Auction to the Trustees of Dart- mouth College, they being the highest bidders, the old Mansion and land for $3,000 payable in one or two years with interest," and on October 5 the title passed to the College. "I feel sad at this sale of the venerable and much loved mansion," President Allen wrote, "yet doubtless a regard to pecuniary matters and the in- terests of my children required the sale, and as a place of future residence, should I live to need a home out of Brunswick, prob- ably it might not have been pleasant to me."
A year later the prudential committee of the trustees was au- thorized "to sell or remove and fit up the Mansion House" and between October 1838 and the spring of 1839 the old house was
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bought by Dr. Otis Russell Freeman and moved to its present lo- cation on West Wheelock Street, on land belonging to his father- in-law, Dr. Samuel Alden. Freeman bought the Mansion for $525 of which he made two payments, $200 in July 1839 and $125 in January 1841. There is no evidence that the final $200 was ever paid and at the time of his father-in-law's death in 1842 he "had not entered into possession of any of the property." On March 26, 1842 he and his wife, Abigail Alden Freeman, transferred to Ira Young, Alpheus Crosby and Edwin D. Sanborn "all lands and buildings occupied by said Alden and said O. R. Freeman."
Four years later Young, as administrator of Alden's estate, deeded to Samuel Allen and Adna Perkins Balch for $1,405 "all right and title . .. to the dwelling house and out buildings lately occupied by Otis R. Freeman." Allen, who was briefly partner with his brother Ira in the livery business, sold his interest to Balch in the fall of 1849. A. P. Balch, who had a Midas touch in business, had married as his second wife Susan Brewster Bibby, granddaughter of Madam Wheelock's half-sister Adriana, and so the old house came back to a Wheelock connection, albeit a re- mote one.
Between 1846 and the 1850s Balch made numerous "improve- ments" to the Mansion. The gambrel roof was changed to the present steep A-roof, the entry was fancied up and a side porch was probably added at this period. By 1850 he was renting the west side to Israel C. Dewey and a year later the east half to Ben- jamin P. Howe who had a bookstore and bindery where the pres- ent Davison building now stands. Mrs. Howe was Eliza Hitchcock of Claremont, N. H., and two of their children were born in the old house, Emily Hitchcock Howe on August 24, 1853 and Charles H. W. Howe three years later. After renting for over a decade Mr. Howe purchased the east side of the house on July 2, 1864, and Mr. Dewey the west.
Dewey sold his half April 18, 1870 to Edward Payson Storrs, whose daughter Harriet was to be third librarian of the future Howe Library. In 1873 Mr. Storrs sold his side to Mrs. Clement Long, widow of the professor of intellectual philosophy at Dartmouth. Eleven years later Mrs. Howe, now widowed, pur- chased Mrs. Long's half and for probably the first time since it was erected the old Wheelock Mansion was wholly occupied by one family.
The appearance of the building bore little resemblance at this
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time to its early simplicity. A large veranda on the east side, where the library stacks are now, overlooked a spacious garden and led to an ell and an attached barn. Bay windows thrust out on either side of a small entrance porch where simple columns supported an iron balcony lush with trailing vines. The house, lowered when it was moved to its new location, stood close to the ground on its granite foundation and its appearance was comfortable but not distinguished.
Mrs. Howe died in 1897 and three years later, on March 22, 1900, Emily Hitchcock Howe, forty-seven years old, "occupation Lady," was married in Hanover to her sixty-seven-year-old wid- ower cousin, Hiram Hitchcock, "Hotel Proprietor," by the Rev. William Jewett Tucker, president of Dartmouth College.
Hiram Hitchcock's career had been fabulous. Born in Clare- mont, N. H., a first cousin of Miss Howe's mother, he was a teacher at sixteen, a writer, and a retired gentleman with wide financial holdings by thirty-four. In Hanover he was largely known as a benefactor of the community-he gave a new organ to the Church of Christ and paid for most of the remodeling of the church interior in memory of his first wife, for whom the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital was named. In New York he lived at the Fifth Avenue Hotel of which he was a proprietor and there he died, nine months after his marriage to Emily Howe.
With his support and advice his bride had shortly before her marriage given her family home, the old Wheelock Mansion, to the town of Hanover as a library. "With a heart full of the most sacred memories, mindful of the visible associations with the name and fame of the builder ... and the prayer that this li- brary may prove a blessing to this community to the remotest generation," it was to her future husband, chairman of the Howe Library Corporation, that she presented the deed of the property at dedication ceremonies held February 22, 1900.
President Tucker gave an historical sketch of the house and the occasion was fully covered by both the metropolitan and local papers. Frank A. Musgrove noted in his Hanover Gazette that on entering, "the colonial appearance is at once remarked, furniture, rugs, pictures, paintings and everything, even to the fixtures, door latches and knockers. Old sofas are noted here and there, while the colonial aspect is further increased by white, wide-board fin- ishings, wall-paper in colonial red, broad old-fashioned doors and an arched ceiling . .. several collections of books are specially
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prized for their age and sentiment, especially a few small volumes found in the partitions of the house during repairs, the character and age of which show that they once belonged to President Wheelock by whom they probably had been stored away for safe- keeping and then their whereabouts possibly forgotten."
The little books, actually found at an earlier date than 1900, included a favorite of Eleazar Wheelock's, The Dying Thoughts of the Reverend and Learned and Holy Mr. Richard Baxter; a rat-gnawed copy of Aesop's Fables; a New Testament; and The British Instructor, or the First Book for Children, printed in Lon- don in 1763. This last is still in the library, witness to the pro- nunciation of our British ancestors as it notes under "Words the same in sound but different in signification":
I'll, I will Ile, of a church Isle, an island and Oil, liquid fat.
The little volume is inscribed to "Hiram A. Hitchcock, Dart- mouth 1879" (another cousin, not to be confused with her fiancé) "from Miss Emily H. Howe Found, this date, in the old Wheelock House ... Feb. 8, 1882."
Some of the Howe family furnishings are still in use in the li- brary: the fender and fire-irons in the adult reading room, the old mahogany clock and gold-framed mirror, a pedestal table and a small, glass-domed, display table. A painting, by W. B. Baker, is a valuable example of the taste of the period. One of the "old- fashioned secretaries" still serves in the storeroom. Over the read- ing room fireplaces hang the charming twin portraits of the little girl Emily Howe and her delicate young brother Charles, and the painting of an older sister she never knew, Sarah M. Howe, is now hung at the end of the hall.
The remodeling of the house was planned and supervised by the college architect, Charles A. Rich, who added the handsome bonded corners to its original narrow clapboards. Both fireplaces go back to 1773 and so do the thin window sashes and the stair- ways, except for a side stairs added in 1914. The main door is a copy of fine colonial woodwork and the window above it, the elaborate Corinthian portico and crowning balustrade were de- signed by Mr. Rich as appropriate for a mansion become library.
Mr. Hitchcock was president of the nineteen-member corpora-
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tion to which Miss Howe gave the new library and also of the first board of trustees which included William T. Smith, John K. Lord, C. F. Richardson, C. P. Chase, Perley R. Bugbee, George Hitchcock (not an immediate relative), H. J. Weston, T. W. D. Worthen, William Jewett Tucker, L. B. Downing and N. A. Frost. Over the years the corporation has increased in member- ship to about sixty-five men and women who elect the twelve trustees to manage library affairs and stand ready to assist in library affairs when called on.
April 6, 1900 the Hanover Gazette announced with a certain dash: "The Howe Library will be thrown open for the delivery of books tomorrow afternoon from 2 to 4 o'clock, and will be open each Saturday thereafter at the same hour. Miss Mabel Read is temporary librarian."
The first patron was little Blanche Poole who "appeared im- mediately after it was opened" and was just as immediately sent home to get a note from her parents, Dr. and Mrs. W. H. Poole. She returned "in season to be the first to draw a book."
By gifts and purchase the library numbered about 1,200 books when it opened, including volumes from the St. Thomas Sunday School library, one of many in the town. That Sunday School li- braries perhaps offered more than just pious reading is suggested by the plight of one little girl who "used to get books at Sunday School but had to read them slyly, her mother not allowing her to read them." Preserved in Baker Library some of these Sunday School books may still be seen.
Emily Hitchcock died in Hanover on January 16, 1912 leaving the Howe Library as the residuary legatee of her considerable estate, approximately $150,000. The inscription on the monument at her grave in the Dartmouth Cemetery was placed there by vote of the library trustees who recognized "with gratitude her great service ... in the establishment and endowment of the Howe Library and her unfailing interest in everything that contributes to its efficiency."
With this dramatic increase in its resources the library at once expanded its physical plant and its services. A fire-resistant brick building for the stacks was built behind the old house where the ell and barn had been and a new reading room for children was opened. The winter of the new construction was distinguished by a bizarre accident when a lady, probably absorbed in a book, fell through the opening for the booklift in the new stack room.
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From this period work with children became increasingly im- portant and in 1916 a trained children's librarian was employed. Eight years later an additional juvenile room was added by cre- ating a new office at the rear of the center hall and converting the old office into a stack room and reading room for older boys and girls. Until the establishment of a separate library in the high school in 1958 Howe was "the" school library. To a great extent it still is, with the staff closely cooperating with the school li- brarian, and sending books to the schools as requested. It is still true, as Miss Dorothy A. Hurlbutt noted in a recent report, that "the children's department, which serves from the youngest up through grade eight in Junior High, is unique even in this town of libraries."
From the beginning the library has been the recipient of many gifts, particularly for the children's rooms where favorite books have been purchased through the Jeffrey Copenhaver Memorial Fund and the Franklin and Douglas Ebaugh Memorial, which also gave the reading table and bench for the littlest readers. A memorial to Vera Patterson Stickney, children's librarian, is mak- ing some special books available. Illustrations, sculpture and ce- ramics have been given by the artists to the juvenile department.
The Unity Club, the Demman Fund and the Mabel Read Fund have all given books to the library outside the limits of its regular book budget. Through the Dorothy Jane Guyer Record Collec- tion, established in 1946, a wide selection of fine recordings are available for loan. The Hanover Garden Club has made the beau- tification of the library grounds an on-going project. Each Christ- mas since 1934 a large creche, carved by craftsmen in Oberam- mergau and presented by Winifred Perkins Raven, has been the heart of the Christmas decoration of the library and since 1956 a fifteenth-century wood and polychrome Madonna, a bequest from Mrs. Raven and her husband, has been equally a part of Christ- mas at the library.
For twenty-seven years Howe Library maintained a branch in Hanover Center or the "North Neighborhood" under the direc- tion of Mrs. H. Derby and Mrs. W. J. Boyd. This was discontin- ued in 1942 since its need had lessened.
In both World Wars the library did its part, collecting books for the armed forces and offering its facilities to servicemen and their families stationed here. An outdoor "reading room" in the library garden was much patronized by mothers and babies in perambu-
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lators while the Naval Officers Training School and their families were here. In 1945 a Veterans' Shelf, set up by Miss Grace Kings- land (librarian from 1923 to 1946), received special commenda- tion from the New Hampshire Library Commission.
It was Miss Kingsland who initiated the present Hospital Aux- iliary "Books for Patients" program in 1934. Each week volun- teers carried two suitcases bulging with books selected by the li- brarian for loan to patients in the Hanover hospital. Eventually the program was moved to a special room at the hospital and a good-sized lending library established there which Miss Kingsland served as a volunteer from her retirement until 1957.
For its first twelve years the library budget depended on the rental of the upper floors in the building to unmarried members of the Dartmouth faculty. With Mrs. Hitchcock's generous be- quest in 1912 and judicious handling of the increased income the assets of the library steadily increased to approximately $220,000 of which $35,000 is reckoned as the value of the plant. For forty- six years residents had used the library facilities free but by 1947 it had become clear that the basis of income from endowment only was not enough to support the library's extended services and the trustees turned to the town of Hanover for support. Since that time Howe has received from the town an annual amount to meet its actual needs as these became evident. During the Library's Fiftieth Anniversary year Friends of the Howe Library also con- tributed a capital sum of about $2,500.
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