Du Temps Perdu

For sale: historic New England homestead, some 250 years old. Sturdy timbers, minimal modernization. Paint and porch recent additions. Early parsonage, once used as a school with quarters for boarding pupils in stand-up attic. Asking $59,500, a highly negotiable figure.

A not uncommon Connecticut real estate offering, but a rare item in the Dartmouth heritage. The parson: Eleazar Wheelock; the pupils: Indian antecedents of today's Dartmouth undergraduates.

The large frame house was standing in 1735 when Wheelock, only two years out of Yale with one year of theological study behind him, answered the call of the parishioners of Lebanon Crank, now part of Columbia. He and his growing family and later his students occupied the house on the green for 34 years — still a record incumbency for a minister of that church — until he removed Moor's Charity School to Hanover with the founding of the College. In 1755 Colonel Joshua More had deeded two adjoining acres, with buildings, for the school that henceforth bore a variation of his name. The school, now a historic site owned by the Columbia Historical Society, remains; it was recently the scene of a Bicentennial reenactment of a day in an early schoolhouse, as local children tried their hands at quill pens and their derrieres at dunce stools.

The Wheelock house has changed hands several times in the interim, but the original construction has been comparatively undisturbed. An ell was added at one time; at another it was converted into a two-family house. An adjacent barn became, and still is, the village general store. Local people are concerned for its preservation. Foundations have been approached toward the end of establishing a museum on the premises or removing the house to another site, so far to no avail.

Columbia remembers Dartmouth and Dartmouth Columbia, although as far as we know no arm or alumnus of the College has indicated an interest in buying the Wheelock house. Eleazar was represented in the village Bicentennial Parade on the 4th of July. A crowd-pleasing float bore a portly gentleman in pre-Revolutionary dress on a two-wheel cart drawn by a team of oxen. Behind him — what else — a wooden barrel symbolizing the storied 500 gallons of New England rum.

A plaque on the schoolhouse reads: "Moor's Charity School, 1755-1769, proudly remembered for 200 years by generations of Dartmouth men as the seeding ground of Dartmouth College and faithful steward of Eleazar Wheelock's generous and crusading spirit." A sign in front of the house reads: "For Sale."