1940

It may be hard to "think fall, football, and mini-reunions" right now, with verdant spring on the doorstep, but give it a try. Bob MacMillan informs me that he has had the Mapleleaf Motel set aside 20 rooms for the Class of '40 for what should be a spectacular Harvard game weekend, October 15-16. Along with The Game, some of the bright plummage of fall should still be lingering in the hills, and then there's also Dartmouth Night, which will be celebrated Friday before the game.

So, if you can make it, let Bob know, P.O. Box 582, Hanover, N.H. as early as possible. Accommodations are going to be hard to find for miles around that weekend, and he'll be tagging rooms on a first-come basis. We haven't zeroed in on a program for Forty yet, but be assured that there will be one which will once again make the gray old rafters ring.

While Bicentennial sometimes seems to have a hollow ring of celebration without substance, the Class of '40 has two very substantive links with our nation's birthday.

Page Smith, maverick academician and rebel historian with a cause (bringing the past to life rather than simply footnoting history), has produced a new two-volume history of the birth of the United States, from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown.

Described as "a great and magnificent work ... a masterpiece," by Samuel Eliot Morrison, under whom Page studied en route to his Ph.D. at Harvard, the work is titled, A New Age NowBegins: A People's History of the AmericanRevolution.

Like his earlier monumental biography of John Adams, Page's Bicentennial history of the forging of "a new nation conceived in liberty" is getting rave reviews and earned selection as a main offering of the Book of-the-Month Club.

While Page helps us all to relive history, BobStorrs is in a very real sense an embodiment of that history, with very special relevance to Hanover and Dartmouth.

A hint of that history was contained in a Bicentennial display about the beginnings of Hanover presented in Baker Library and containing, among other exhibits, a hand-sketched map dating back to 1761 showing the first landholdings in the town. Names written into the land parcels included Joseph Storrs, Bob's great, great, great-grandfather, and Samuel Storrs, who was Joseph's father.

It all started 216 years ago, in 1760, when Joseph Storrs emerges in the records as a leader of a group of families in Windham County, Conn., who saw new opportunity in the thenwilderness of the Upper Connecticut River Valley. The last of the French-Indian Wars, which for years had left that territory a kind of no-man's land for Europeans or colonists, had just ended in victory for Britain.

For those Connecticut yeoman, the Connecticut River beckoned like a boulevard to promised land empty except for Indians, who were reported retiring northwestward with their French or British allies. For the price of hard work and high risk, they saw there the chance to acquire a handsome patrimony of land, cornerstone of security in the 18th century.

Joseph Storrs was one of two men who personally travelled from Mansfield, Conn, to Portsmouth to petition Gov. Benning Wentworth to give sanction to their hopes by chartering townships along the reaches of the Upper Connecticut River. They succeeded, and Joseph was also among a handful of the charter proprietors who then made their way up river to survey lots on the settlement site they called Hanover, after a district in Mansfield, Conn. Land parcels were assigned by a draw from a hat, and Joseph wound up with one plot just north of what now is the Green and another about where the new Howe Library is, while his father invested in a plot which would look to be near where the old medical school building was. Later, in 1769, after having been elected a selectman in absentia, he was one of the original grantees who gave up a part of his holdings to make up the gift of land that proved instrumental in prompting Eleazar Wheelock to found Dartmouth College in Hanover instead of one of the several other communities in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York bidding for his academic enterprise.

Actually, except for his pioneer visits to Hanover, Joseph never settled in the new community. That move was left to his son Augustus, a young revolutionary war soldier who incidentally witnessed the execution of Col. Andre for his assistance to Benedict Arnold in the latter's tragic treason. Records show that Augustus, born in 1762 just as the Honover was a'borning, moved north between 1782 and 1792, and the family has called Hanover its home ever since.

Thus, Bob is one of those rare people in the mobile and surging society spawned within this new nation who still treads on the ground his forebears have trod literally from the beginning of the white man's occupancy. And, as pediatrician at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital and clinical associate professor of maternal and child health at Dartmouth Medical School, he continues to devote his life to bringing new life into the area carved out by his ancestors.

Sec'y, 4 Parkhurst Hall Hanover, N.H. 03755

Class Agent, 360 Rumstick Point Road Barrington, R.I. 02806