Not a House but Still Home

1770

Students live in lean-tos and sleep on hemlock boughs.

1771

Eighty students share 16 rooms in the new dorm.

1772

Joseph Vail exchanges his labor for room in a grist mill four miles from campus. By Vail's junior year his health is so bad that Eleazar Wheelock secures a room for him on campus.

1822

A student found keeping a gun in his room is fined one dollar. A student found with playing cards is fined five dollars.

1828

Students have no choice but to sleep in the classroom. The chambers of Dartmouth Hall serve double duty as sleeping quarters and recitation halls.

1894

A housing shortage forces the College to build 13 dorms over the next 12 years.

1904

The installation of indoor plumbing prompts alumni protest that students are being coddled.

1934

"Moderate" drinking and female visitors are permitted in the dorms. Residents are expected to police themselves.

1945

Women and drinking are banned from dorms.

1952

College employees stop making students' beds.

1978

While men at other schools clamor for coed dorms, male Dartmouth students widely applaud the deans' decision to keep Streeter a "strong" single-sex dorm.

1981

William Crooker, director of student housing, laments the loss of his most effective weapon against dorm damage. "Years ago the dorms with the most damage couldn't have girls in their rooms over the weekend," he notes. "But that doesn't work anymore."

1983

Dartmouth hires its first dean of residential life.

1995

Dartmouth is the only Ivy school that does not have special residence halls for freshmen. Five hundred students sign a petition to stop a plan by the deans to establish freshmen dorms.

Off-campus housing givesstudents a sense of freedom.