DARTMOUTH'S RIVER

The Variable Connecticut Has Enlivened College History

HANOVER, FROM THE DAYS when its first three inhabitants pitched their tents away from the dark, Indian-infested pine forest and as close as possible to the "water carriage of the Connecticut," has been a river settlement; just as Dartmouth, in its beginnings, has owed its existence to the river.

At times, with the turbulence of the steeply descending rapids between the First and Second Connecticut Lakes near its source, the river has raised strife and bitterness between the men living on its banks. At other times, as peacefully as it flows between the meadows in the great oxbow at Haverhill, where it wanders seven miles in order to advance one, the river has seemed disarmingly quiescent, willing to exist only for its beauty.

Perhaps fittingly, rising as it does in the almost mythical isolation of the Fourth Connecticut Lake, a mountain pond near the Canadian border so deep in the wilderness that it is seldom visited even by guides, this is a river of secrets. But however misleading its aspects may be—peaceful or boisterous—or however hidden in history this fact may be, the Upper Connecticut actually has never ceased to exert its powerful influence on men's imaginations; and they have wanted, as did Eleazar Wheelock looking for a site for his Indian school, to use, for their own purposes, the river's beauty, its possibilities for transportation, and its power.

These three uses have at times alternated with surprising suddenness.

An early Hanover booster, hoping that Wheelock would choose this village as the site for his School, urged, "This is a very narrow place in the great river for a bridge; by a long pair of falls, and where salt and other articles brought up the river will be cheaper than they will be farther up" .... and (as Eleazar himself added, perhaps thinking of it as a sort of school bus) "as near as any to the Indians."

Since that time a good deal of river history has come and gone. Four bridges, variously fated, and an unknown number of ferries have connected the "narrow place" between Norwich and Hanover. In the building and abandoning of a series of locks and canals between Hanover and White River, used as "slips" for a busy traffic of boats and barges, thousands of dollars were lost, made, and lost again. The grist mills, run by the power of the "pair of fall," and the taverns and stores that sprang up beside the grist mills, might never have been. The "John Ledyard" and the "Adam Duncan," steamboats commanded by Captain Nutt of Lebanon and hailed by crowds watching them travel up to the distant reaches of Wells River, were sold for junk. The great log drives, as unruly and dangerous as the breaking ice they followed down from the North, were over with the coming of the railroad. For some eighty years, Hanover and the North Country generally have not been river-minded, except during the excitement of flood-times, and re*al knowledge of the river seems to have become limited, as it was in Indian days, to the canoeist, the hunter and the fisherman.

Actually, during this period of seeming calm, another phase of the river's history was beginning.

About two years ago, rumors at first no louder than the sound of the Wilder Falls heard in Hanover on a still night, began to go up and down the Valley; and in stores and farm kitchens from Wilder to Wells River, the words "power project" and "forty-mile lake" were repeated in various tones of apprehension, aversion or rebellion. Now the rumors have approached actuality, and it is generally accepted that the Bellows Falls Hydro-Electric Corporation's "Proposed Wilder Development." many years in preparation, will go through, its construction to begin after the war. General Burgoyne's description of Vermonters as "the most active and rebellious race on the continent", though old is still good, and can be vouched for by the "man from the Power Company" whose doughty mission it has been to buy up land and flowage rights from farmers whose property will be affected by the project.

If this goes through, and there are strong indications that it will, a great dam, erected at a cost of about eight million dollars, will be built across the "Narrows" just below Wilder. In the words of the Company report, "The dam will be of concrete founded on ledge with the embankments at either end. Total length of the dam and embankments will be about 1,500 feet and it will have a spillway divided into five sections The discharge capacity of the new spillway and gates will be materially in excess of the capacity of the present dam Top elevation of gates and flashboards, unless otherwise ordered by the commissions, will be 385 feet above mean sea level, which is about 16 feet higher than the present development. This will result in a pond, extending to a point some four miles below Wells River, which for the most part will be contained within the present river banks The present license stipulates that a fishway be installed upon redevelopment in accordance with the requirements of the Secretary of the Interior." As an aside to the fishway project, it is locally added that if the problem of sewage pollution of the water at Hanover and the towns north can be settled, there may be fish.

But it is the idea of the pond or lakelike river, extending about 46 miles from Wilder to Wells River and changing the centuries-old outline of the river, that is causing the greatest concern. In Vermont the farmers say, "It is easier to fight fire than water." They have seen the Connecticut roar up the banks in floods and, in the early spring break-ups, hurl the weight of ice across bridges and roads. With the raising of the water level, they think that, "no matter what them Power fellows say," ice, water and floods are going to invade their houses and barns. Engineers who have seen their dams handle water at the Fifteen Miles Falls and take care of more difficult projects say otherwise. One New Hampshire farmer, whose family has lived for generations, in the Valley, expressed a general conviction when he said, "If the water comes right up into my house—and mind you, I think it will I'm going to build me a houseboat, and hitch it up somehow, right here. I don't aim to move."

All of which, in the spirit of controversy, takes us back to the past. In times of change, it is easier to visualize what has happened than what may happen.

The actual site of the new dam, on the New Hampshire side, will be at a littleknown but historic place—at the "lower bar" or rapids, where 135 years ago, Mills Olcott, Hanover tycoon and businessman, overcame innumerable vicissitudes to build the locks and canal which, sunk in a meadow, are all but forgotten but still are monuments to his determination. The farmers made the same complaints then, that their fields were being flooded, and the town of Lebanon especially objected to Olcott's power project. Few people now leave their cars on the stretch of road between Wilder and White River to cross the meadow and to find the ruins of these locks; or to see the old "carry" paths, older than the locks, which still skirt them and are used by farmers today.

The Connecticut River has the honor of being the first in America to boast a system of canals around its principal falls, of which there were many. Between Hartford, Conn., and Hanover, there were thirteen bars or rapids at which it was necessary to "unload and carry by." The canal builders had no precedents to follow and had to proceed on original lines. After the building of the locks and canals, the river became a main traffic artery, and larger freight boats were constructed. The perfected type was a flatboat about seventy feet long, with a mast, and in the stern a cabin. Smaller boats for the Upper Valley were without cabins. Barnet, Vermont, was always a goal for northern boat traffic, but actually Wells River was the head of the river transportation. At bad places in the river, where the current was apt to counteract a good wind, "helpers" set up their homes, ready to help get the boats going with ropes and oxen. It was said that the men working in the river service were the "stoutest, heartiest and merriest in the Valley."

By 1810 there was a canal system along the Connecticut which extended 320 miles above Hartford. The coming of the railroad put an end to a tremendous scheme which was intended to connect shipping by canal from New Haven to Barnet. Governor De Witt Clinton of New York made a triumphal tour over the proposed route, and was entertained at a dinner attended by many lofty personages at the Dartmouth Hotel in Hanover.

Mills Olcott was Hanover's local canaland-lock builder. He seems to have been a man well qualified to bear the troubles and disappointments of his business. In the construction of these same lower locks, half of the dam was carried away by a freshet and three workmen were drowned. News of this disaster was brought to Mr. Olcott in Hanover by a horseman, who dashed to the builder's home. Mr. Olcott was reading Shakespeare to his family. When told the latest bad news, he considered it, then said, "Well, I don't see how I can help it," and continued his reading. His later years were filled with lawsuits about his projects but, as recorded in Lord's History of Dartmouth College, "he had, besides shrewdness and pluck, the greatest advantage in being.... able to continue quietly collecting the tolls which furnished him with the sinews of war, while his enemies were being wasted in purse and discouraged by delays."

Anyone standing today on the top of the old Olcott locks and looking up the river toward Wilder, can see even farther into the past, if he remembers that it was at these falls that Major Robert Rogers, the Vermont Ranger, came to grief in 1759. Although Indians had used the river as a warpath and hunting ground since earliest days, Rogers is the first white man to mention these treacherous rapids. Returning from the sack of the Indian village of St. Francis, he had left the remnant of his starving party of Rangers at the mouth of the Ammonoosuc and had gone ahead with two companions, hoping to bring help from Fort Number Four (Charlestown). He described his fate later to General Amherst: "The current carried us down the stream in the middle of the river, where we kept our miserable vessel with such paddles as could be split and hewn with small hatchets. The second day we reached White River Falls and very narrowly escaped running over them. The raft went over and was lost, but our remaining strength enabled us to land and march by the fa 115.... we killed some red squirrels and a partridge .... and I constructed another raft. Not being able to cut the trees, I burnt them down."

ONCE WAS BUSY ROUTE

The river in spite of its long "carries" was an early thoroughfare. Between 1760 and 1790 nearly 100,000 settlers came to New Hampshire and Vermont by canoe or flatboat.

In 1773, Eleazar Wheelock, according to college records, paid Benjamin Wright and Sons about $5.25 for bringing merchandise, including rum and three barrels of salt, to the college landing by boat from Bellows Falls. The college landing was approximately where the end of the present bridge now is. At that time there was a strip of meadow sloping toward the river, and a wagon road following it to Mink Brook. Staples and household goods were brought up the river, much of it by sledge on the ice. Wheelock's family came to Hanover from Connecticut over newly built, rough roads, but it is likely that their supplies came by boat, or on the ice in the winter. The river then abounded in salmon and the falls were the favorite fishing places for the Indians, who speared them.

Controversy was an early product of life on the river. Upon Wheelock's application to Governor Wentworth in June 1773, the Governor in the name of the Crown (the same Crown that had already decreed that New Hampshire extended to the west bank of the Connecticut), granted to the College "the sole privilege .... of a Ferry boat or boats from the shore of Hanover across the river Connecticut and back again." Since the original ferry was owned by one Sargeant of Norwich, he resented its being taken away from him and leased back to him by Wheelock; and also, perhaps, he resented the fact that while the toll was three coppers for man, horse and load, or one copper for a foot passenger who did not own a canoe, it was free for Wheelock's "natural family." There began a long feud between Hanover and Norwich which lasted long after the ferry era was ended and extended vigorously into the bridge era. There were at least two other ferries besides the one at the college landing which were operated under the college grant. One was located about a mile above the village at the mouth of the "Vale of Tempe" and was known as the "Rope Ferry" because the boat was attached to a rope stretched across the river. Another ferry was at Pompanoosuc.

In 1792 a charter authorized the building of a toll bridge between the banks of Hanover and Norwich. The College was enthusiastic, and subscribed for several shares in the bridge company. As might be expected, Norwich was against a toll bridge, although conceding that it would probably be better than a ferry. This bridge, which was built and opened to traffic in the fall of 1796, was a very nitusual structure. It was constructed of the largest selected pines, some sixty feet long, with the timbers eighteen inches square. As described in Early Houses ofNorwich, this first bridge "leaped the river with one huge central span of 236 feet, arched up so that it was 30 feet higher in the middle than at the ends." This great leap lasted only eight years, then the bridge collapsed of its own weight. No one was injured, although a team bearing a messenger for the doctor in Hanover barely escaped. Two other toll bridges succeeded this one. Their perpetual poor state of repair, plus promises made, then broken, to the people of Hanover and Norwich, kept up a constant friction and bickering. It is recorded that one day three gentlemen from the bridge company were riding across to Norwich when the driver, an anti-bridge man, put his horses into a fast gallop. The bridge swayed to such an alarming degree that the passengers cried out for mercy. The only reassurance they got from the driver was it must be safe since the bridgeowners themselves were aboard.

The toll gate at the eastern end was guarded by a crabbed man named Samuel T. Cutler, who with his son ran a little shop for cabinet work. The bridge was a favorite vantage point for townspeople and students who liked to watch the river in times of high water and moving ice. Mr. Cutler would let anyone who wanted to, watch these natural phenomena and no toll was exacted, but if the toe of one foot touched Norwich soil, he was hot in pursuit. The students are said to have spent a good many hours in Cutler-baiting, and in adding to the general ill-will.

The climax of the fighi of the bridges came when Professor Sanborn, one of the most learned and respected members of the Dartmouth faculty, was arrested in Woodstock by order of the bridge company, which was bringing suit against him. In protest at the poor condition in which the bridge was maintained, Professor Sanbom had led a movement to cross the river 011 the ice by a footpath in the winter rather than pay toll. In one of the stories which survive this happening, it is said that when the news of his spectacular arrest was brought to the prisoner's wife, the Vermont (anti-New Hampshire, anti-College) messenger phrased it: "Don't be askin' for your husband, Mum, for they have jailed the old fool in Woodstock and as far as I am concerned, I hope the old New Hampshire idiot will stay there."

But all hatchets were buried when, on July 1, 1859, the John Ledyard Bridge, the first free bridge across the Connecticut River, was opened to traffic. This occasion was celebrated by special services in the College Church, which was crowded with people from Norwich and Hanover. Professor Sanborn was one of the main speakers on the program. Of the new bridge he said, "There is an eloquence in its strong timbers and unobstructed pathway that invites patronage, and wins the market man and the traveller to our village. .... Those periodical contests waged by inconsiderate youths with the Cerberus that kept the gate, have received their final quietus."

The Reverend Dr. Bournes of Norwich also spoke of peace—and profit: "We will send you in Hanover our good rock maple, our beech and birchwood to warm you in winter.... and eggs and butter and other good things to the ladies of Hanover to help them sustain creditably the load and agony of their hospitalities at Commencement—and we feel sure we shall be abundantly paid for these things! We invite all Hanoverians to cross over and see us. We think we have greener hills than you have, and pleasanter roads and drives than you have."

John Ledyard, the Dartmouth student and wanderer who has been called the first embodiment of the Dartmouth Spirit, is the namesake for many river craft and landmarks. Dartmouth's Ledyard Canoe Club recalls in name as well as example his famous trip down the Connecticut from Hanover to the sea in 1773 when he fashioned his own dugout canoe from a pine he felled or "stole." It was fifty feet long and three feet wide with a shelter of willow twigs at one end, dried venison for provisions, and Ovid and the Greek testament for company. After the founding of the Canoe Club in 1920, one hundred and twelve Dartmouth men, between 1921 and 1935, made Ledyard's trip by canoe to Saybrook, Conn. Johnny Johnson, patron saint of the Canoe Club, presented the "Ledyard Cup" on which is inscribed the names of the men who followed in the wake of John Ledyard's paddle. Before the war, the Canoe Club boasted a membership of eighty men, a fleet of twenty-one canoes and a modern boat house built for the club in 1930.

The long northern winters and the dangers of high water have kept the Dartmouth crew, originally founded in 1874, from undertaking early practice on the river, and so from marked success in intercollegiate competition. In the fall of 1874, there were inter-class crew races on the river, with the Class of 1874 carrying off the honors. In the winter of 1877 the boathouse collapsed from the heavy ice, and it was not until 1934 that a Dartmouth crew was organized as part of the college sports program. A new boathouse, a motorboat, two new shells and some fifty men then brought new life to the sport. There is little doubt, if the Bellows Falls project goes through, that crew will have a new impetus after the war, as the water will be less swift in the spring and practice can be begun with safety earlier in the season.

John Ledyard's name also comes down to us in the history of Hanover's brief but colorful steamboat era.

The "Connecticut River Valley Steamboat Company" planned for a fleet of steamboats to run in relays, connecting seven towns from Hartford to Wells River. Five boats would provide this service daily. Before this scheme was put through, however, an experimental trip was made in July, 1831, by the "John Ledyard," a small steamer commanded by Captain Samuel Nutt of Lebanon, a veteran river man. This ship set out from Springfield, Mass., for Barnet, Vt. It was acclaimed by cheers and great excitement all along its way. At Wells River, Captain Nutt met such unfavorable conditions that he decided he could not make Barnet, but some three hundred local inhabitants, of Scotch descent, were determined that the goal should be reached. They attempted to lift the boat bodily over the sandbar which was holding it back. In the account in Lord's History: "After raising her so far from a horizintal position that the explosion of the boiler became imminent, the Captain asked them to desist, and it took twenty or thirty of them to pull her back into deep water again."

The trip of the "John Ledyard" was hailed by an unknown poet: "The bells ring out their farewell peal, "The cannons roar o'er hill and dale. "We'll hail the day when Captain Nutt "Sailed up our fair Connecticut."

The "Adam Duncan" was a second famous local steamboat, also commanded by Captain Nutt. Its span of service, too, was brief and its end spectacular. On her second trip, which was a Fourth of July excursion from White River to Hanover, the connecting pipe between the boilers burst, allowing a good deal of steam to escape. A passenger became terrified, jumped overboad and was drowned. After this the idea of regular steamboat service was given up; the "Adam Duncan" was sold to the ever-shrewd Mills Olcott for junk.

Not far from Hanover, on the Connecticut, the first American steamboat was propelled by paddle wheels.

To Samuel Morey of Orford goes the honor of being the inventor of this historic craft. Morey's boat, launched 14 years before Fulton's "Clermont" was put on the Hudson, was given its trial run on the Connecticut between Orford and Fairlee. Morey was not a businessman and never received the fame or money which he might have had from his inventions. The Reverend Cyrus Mann, a Dartmouth graduate of 1806, later described the first trip made by Morey's steamboat, which, because of the possibility of failure, was given its trial run during Sunday meeting, when few onlookers were about. Mann wrote, "The astonishing sight of this man ascending the Connecticut River between Orford and Fairlee in a little boat just large enough to contain himself and his rude machinery connected with the steam boiler and a handful of wood for fire, was witnessed by men in my boyhood and by others who yet survive as early as 1793."

It is a documented fact that Fulton visited Morey in Orford, and later events proved that Fulton was the better businessman of the two; as well as being quick to see the possibilities of paddle-propelled steamboats.

"What happened to Morey's boat?" is still a matter of conjecture in Fairlee and Orford. Some say it was filled with rocks and sunk in Lake Morey. Samuel Morey's personal physician claimed that Morey "worked it up for firewood."

It appears now that the future of Dartmouth's river will be one of recreation; it will have a new beauty which, unfamiliar now, is destined to become a vital part of the college memory. Whatever this future may be, it will have its own value.

For the enterprise which sent settlers and the traffic of boats farther and farther north along the Connecticut; the unremitting efforts of Eleazar Wheelock, looking for the best site on the river for his School; the dreams of Samuel Morey; even the stubborn ingenuity of Mills Olcott, go back to a spiritual beginning which is inherent in Dartmouth, as it is in the river's history.

This beginning, which was first awakened along the Connecticut River, is part of America itself; and can be expressed in the words of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, who, leading his flock away from the autocratic rule of the Massachusetts Bay Colony into unknown hardships of pioneering, along the banks of the Connecticut, said, "The foundation of author- ity is laid firstly in the free consent of the people."

The Reverend Hooker would not have described his opinion as a foundation for democracy, nor Wheelock have called his School the forerunner of a Liberal Arts college. Yet both are related, as part of a lasting human tradition.

It might be said of Dartmouth and her river, as it was of Oxford and hers: "Through all the changes, greater than the traditions gathered round her; wiser than the prejudices which she has outgrown; saved by the new blood ever flowing through her as strongly as the waters underneath her, still young in heart and ineffaceable in beauty, [the College] lives, sharing her treasures ungrudgingly with those who seek them, her spirit with those that understand."

LITTLE-KNOWN LOCKS, built by Mills Olcott 135 years ago, still exist a few miles south of Hanover, marking the spot where the river steamboats used to navigate around the Wilder rapids.

LOG DRIVES DOWN THE CONNECTICUT RIVER were an annual excitement for students and townspeople before the railroad pushed its way north in the 1800's.

FOR PRESENT-DAY DARTMOUTH STUDENTS the Connecticut represents mostly a means of recreation. Above, two members of the Ledyard Canoe Club are shown out on the sun-flecked river. Below, the Dart- mouth crew, after a trial run down the river, returns its shell to the Fuller Boathouse on the river's bank.

FOR PRESENT-DAY DARTMOUTH STUDENTS the Connecticut represents mostly a means of recreation. Above, two members of the Ledyard Canoe Club are shown out on the sun-flecked river. Below, the Dart- mouth crew, after a trial run down the river, returns its shell to the Fuller Boathouse on the river's bank.

AN AERIAL VIEW SHOWS STRIKINGLY THE WAY IN WHICH THE RIVER COMES DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND WINDS PAST HANOVER PLAIN