Old Families of Hanover

THE GREAT FAMILY ESTABLISHED BY PRESIDENT NATHAN LORDIN HANOVER MORE THAN 100 YEARS AGO

THAT CHARACTERISTIC of Dartmouth which has proven so powerful an influence in the hearts of its thousands of sons in all the generations of the College is a very living and vital thing. It is living because into the existence of the institution has been infused the life-blood and thoughts and efforts of so many fine, cultured, courageous and selfsacrificing men. Of the families that have made the College a cause, there is none that has contributed more sons or more devotion than the Lord family.

In a recent book by Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, much of the period contemporary with the Lord family's influence upon the College is discussed. However, Mr. Brooks pays very little attention to the people outside the Boston area where Harvard to a degree dominated the scene. He dismisses such colleges as Dartmouth and Bowdoin and Amherst and others of their kind without much emphasis. Indeed he even quotes Ik Marvel's statement which consigns Yale to the class of a "football" college as far as culture is concerned. And yet the influence of these other colleges played an enormous part in the cultural life of New England and the nation. Bowdoin College contributed Longfellow and Hawthorne. Dartmouth furnished him with some of his principal actors in Webster, Choate, and Ticknor. The very Handel Society he mentions had its roots in Hanover, and he himself tells of the early coming of the study of German to the Athens of America (Boston, not Philadelphia), when no lexicon of the German Language could be found and it was necessary to send to Hanover for one. He even comes to Hanover for his "rogue," Stephen Burroughs, and of John Lord (Beacon Lights of History), who was the first popularizer of history with audiences and readers in the thousands, and of Alpheus Crosby, one of the greatest Greek authorities of the day, he says never a word. Nor of Nathan Smith, founder of medical schools at Dartmouth, Bowdoin, and Yale.

Dartmouth College has never done much advertising of the cultural influence it has exerted. Someone will do it sometime however. In the years when American culture was in the making, the College was devoting itself to a single purpose amidst the strain and growing-pains of a new nation. That was the development of the cultural college, not the university or the training school, a purpose which has been ever dominant in the minds of its directors. It was so with the elder Wheelock, with Dr. Tucker of loved memory, and is so now with President Hopkins. To these names must be added the name of Nathan Lord, whose influence extended from his appointment as trustee in 1821 to his resignation from the presidency in 1863.

Bowdoin gave him to Dartmouth. He was born in South Berwick, Maine, went to Phillips Exeter, Bowdoin 1809, Andover Theological in 1815 and after a pastorate at Amherst, N. H„ came to Hanover as President of the College in 1828. He was not the first of the Hanover Lords, or of the Dartmouth Lords, for a Connecticut branch of the family had already settled in the town (Lord's Hill), and a John Lord of that family, from Lyme, Connecticut, had been graduated in the class of 1799. When Nathan Lord came to Hanover, his sister Susan had already lived here as the wife of William Allen Hayes, a preceptor in Moor's Charity School. Her granddaughter, by the way, daughter of John Lord Hayes, recently sent the College a very valuable collection of letters and manuscripts. President Lord ruled as chief executive officer in turbulent years in the history of the College. The story is told in the excellent histories of his grandson Prof. John King Lord '6B and of Prof. Leon Burr Richardson '00. From President Nathan Lord were descended more than 160 sons, daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and at least twenty-one of his descendants were graduated from the College. The latest graduate is Frederic Mather Lord of the class of 1936.

Stormy years those were in the chronicles of the College. Nathan Lord had every conceivable problem to struggle with. He had to pay off the remaining indebtedness which hung over from the Dartmouth College Case, he had to erect new quarters and he saw the completion of Wentworth, Thornton, and Reed Halls during his early years as chief administrator. He revised the curriculum from time to time and brought it up to the needs of the times. All through his reign the great cloud of the Civil War was looming. It made foes of friends, and it kept alumni and students stirred up constantly. And when it finally came, he faced the facts straightforwardly as he had faced all his problems, and he went to defeat without compromising. But in all those years he had built up the Dartmouth that most of us know, he had established it once and for all as a college and not as a university, in fact as well as in name. From the very beginning he emphasized the importance of this. See what he says in his inaugural:

"The examples of other times, when thelearning of Universities all had respect tothe future political and ecclesiastical relations of the student, and these institutionsbecame little better than panders to allieddespotism a?id superstition, may teach usto cultivate our youth in the elements ofgeneral knowledge, and impart vigor, andforce, and freeness to their minds, in thecourse of sound fundamental study, before they are permitted to engage in anymerely professional acquisitions; to practise them tuell on the broad threshold ofscience, before they are exposed to beblasted, or bewildered, by the prematureunfolding of its mysteries. They will thengo forward, prepared, not merely to acquire the technicalities of a profession, butto investigate its essential principles; toavoid those ignes fatui which so often, withthe appearance of truth, mislead and destroy, and draiu out from the depths, theliving form of truth itself; and thus contribute to the destined emancipation ofthe world from ignorance, prejudice, andmisrule, and the worst influence of falsephilosophy."

This from a man 36 years old, the youngest college president in America.

He had a firm hand and he needed one. The times were not far from pioneer days, and there were no athletics to absorb the energy of his students. It was only toward the end of his career, in 1856, that the Dartmouth crew was formed and began intercollegiate competition. Student energy was always boiling over. One group fired off a cannon under the windows of the College and broke nearly 400 windows. One man loaded a "stone jug" with powder and exploded it in a hall. A professor coming to class one day met a skunk perched upon his desk, and animals often found their way into Dartmouth Hall and sometimes up two flights of stairs. Rushes and hornblowing were sometimes resorted to, and anti-slavery meetings were quite likely to break up in riots. Witnesses tell of President Lord, clad in sombre garb, with long tails and high hat, rushing into the middle of some student fracas and bringing it to a well-climaxed finish with aid of his cane.

"Desist, Gentlemen, Desist!"

His eldest son, John King Lord (the first of three John Kings), was graduated from the college in 1836. He studied at Andover, and went eventually to Cincinnati as pastor of the First (Congregational) Church. He was known as a man of great spirit, and despite the remonstrances of friends carried his pastoral visits into the homes of persons brought down with cholera during a number of epidemics. He took the disease himself and died, a comparatively young man.

There was born as his fourth child, John King Lord, second, known affectionately to many generations of Dartmouth men as "Johnny K." This might have been to distinguish him from Prof. George D. Lord '84, not of the direct line of Nathan, but a distant relation, who is still living and held greatly in esteem by the alumni and his associates. The services of John King Lord '6B to the college were no less distinguished than those of his grandfather. He taught Latin, his students vow, as no other man taught it. He was not only historian of the College, but also of the town, and he is remembered as well for his chapel talks and his discourses at various times upon college subjects. His talk on Dartmouth Hall, delivered shortly after' the burning of the old building in 1904, is a veritable masterpiece. It was reprinted in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE of February, 1929.

It is almost impossible for alumni of the years 1869-1916 to think of the College without thinking of Johnny K. He was so much a part of it, and so whole-heartedly devoted to its interests. That he had an

"eagle-eye," as the song phrased it, was but one of the characteristics that he must have inherited from his grandfather. The depth of his learning and the dignity of his bearing drove away not one whit of the familiarity which it has ever been the right of the Dartmouth student to visit upon his professors. In two periods of crisis he took charge of the institution as acting head, and brought it through safely without the College suffering any loss of standing or prestige.

One of Professor Lord's sons, Dr. Fred- eric Pomeroy Lord of the class of 1898, Medical School 1903, is a professor at the present time in the Medical School, thus carrying on the official connection of the Lord family with the College, almost un- interruptedly since 1821. His wife, who, before her marriage was Lydia Jeannette Mather; is the author of a genealogy which includes all the known descendants of Nathan Lord.

A very famous member of the Lord family was John Lord of the class of 1833, known best for his Beacon Lights of History, the first known popularization of historical subjects in modern times. His influence was enormous. His books sold by the thousands. In fact they were to be found in almost every New England household until recent times. His father was John Perkins Lord, of the Harvard class of 1805, a brother of President Nathan Lord of Dartmouth. John Lord began his career as a minister, but his frank method of embarking upon controversial subjects put an end to his career in the pulpit, and he went into the highways and byways as a lecturer upon historical subjects. He was strongly individualized, spoke with intensity and emotion, and literally won over thousands of people in his audiences to his methods of presenting history.

Of the other Lords of the Nathan Lord family were the sons, Joseph Leland of the class of 1842, Frederic Richardson of the class of 1842, Samuel Augustus of the class of 1843 (twin brother to Frederic), William Hayes 1843, Nathan 1851, Francis Brown 1856. Their families are scattered all over the country. Nathan had a daughter, Mary French Lord, who was married to George H. Palmer of the class of 1845. In the third generation from Nathan, and sister to Professor John K. Lord, was Elizabeth Amelia, who was married to Aaron Dayton Condit of the class of 1868. Their son Dayton Lord Condit was a member of the class of 1900.

To the two John King Lords, in direct descent from Nathan, must be added the third, John King Lord of the class of 1895. These three were known respectively as John King, minister (class of 1836), John King, teacher (class of 1868), and John King, lawyer. Another son of Professor John K. Lord is Arthur Hardy Lord (named after Arthur Sherburne Hardy, well known novelist and Dartmouth professor), of the class of 1910. A daughter, Laura Woolsey Lord, who was married to Robert L. Scales of the class of 1901, became, after her husband's death, warden of Smith College.

For the other Lords and their relations by marriage, but a word must suffice. Judge William Adams Lord of the class of 1869 was the son of William Hayes Lord of the class of 1843. His sister Sarah Appleton married the Rev. Dr. Martin D. Kneeland, and their son, William Aiken Kneeland, was graduated in the class of 1904. Sarah Elizabeth Lord, a daughter of President Nathan Lord was born in Hanover in 1835. She was married to Andrew Moody of Lowell and their daughter Elizabeth Leland Moody was married in Hanover in' 1889 to Arthur Fairbanks '86, later professor and art director of the College. Richard Ordway, a grandson of Sarah Elizabeth Lord is at present a sophomore in Dartmouth College, and another young man from the same branch of the family has recently applied for admission to the College. So there seems little chance of the Nathan Lord line severing its connection with Dartmouth.

PROF. JOHN KING LORD '68This portrait by Joseph De Camp hangs in the office of President Hopkins and is considered one of the artist's best pieces of work.

WENTWORTH STREET OF OLD—NORTH SIDE OF THE CAMPUS This is probably the earliest photograph taken in Hanover. At the right is old. Lang Hall part of which was used as a recitationhail during the controversy between the College and University. The second building was known as the Rood House in lateryears, though earlier in the Nineteenth Century it was used on two occasions as a school for "young ladies." During the administration of Mrs. Peabody, widow of a professor, it was the scene of one of Susan Coolidge's story "What Katy Did at School."The third house is the Lord House. The fourth called at present the "Choate House" was known successively as the Ripley, theOlcott, and the Leeds House. The last building is the old White Church. In the immediate foreground is the old elm., now agiant tree, which is probably the only object in the picture now standing in its original position, as the houses have been torndown or moved, the White Church burned, and the fences have been demolished.

DR. FREDERICK P. LORD '98 Great-Grandson of President Lord, andprofessor of anatomy in the DartmouthMedical School.

PRESIDENT NATHAN LORD

PROF. GEORGE D. LORD '84 Professor Lord, now retired, is a relative ofPresident Nathan Lord, though not adirect descendant.