COLLEGE SEAL

The first order of business for College trustees at their August 1773 meeting was to vote on a Dartmouth seal. Today its designer remains unknown, although speculation abounds that founder Eleazar Wheelock drew it up. “The result is a piece of late-colonial kitsch,” according to an article about the seal’s history that appeared in the Dartmouth College Library Bulletin in 1997. In 1957 someone noticed a major error on the seal: It featured the year 1770, as shown in the die above, but the College was founded in 1769. This led to the formation of a committee and much hand- wringing before it was decided to fix the date with a new version of the seal. For official use only, it is not the same seal as the one commonly found on T-shirts and stationery. That is a simplified version that came out in the mid-20th century.