These short pieces relating to Hanover history were written by Hanover Historical Society Researcher Teresa J. Oden. Most of them were sent to Society members during 2016-2017 in e-mail newsletters. View our timeline for more Hanover, NH History.
Bicycles
The first bicycles ridden in the U.S. came as imports from Europe. In 1878 a Hartford, Ct., company that manufactured sewing machines started producing cycles. As more companies put bicycles on the market Americans’ interest in the sport grew rapidly.
In Hanover there was only a sprinkling of bikes until 1894, when Newton Frost began selling and renting them from his jewelry shop. Business was brisk, and before long Frost installed an air pump in front of his store as a courtesy to his customers. A couple years later Hanover had its first repair shop.
Mr. Frost favored, appropriately, a high-end model called “The Diamond”, which cost about $100. At the low end of the range Sears, Roebuck offered several models for around $20 in their catalogs. By 1899 a million bikes were being produced in the U.S. each year. Prices began to tumble as the market became saturated.
Cycling was promoted as healthy exercise, but country roads could exact a physical toll. Ads in The Hanover Gazette encouraged riders to head to the pharmacy for salves to treat abrasions and kidney pills to aid those much-rattled internal organs. In due course cyclists began to campaign for better roads.
In a rural area like Hanover bikes offered new possibilities for passing the time. The Gazette reported interesting trips such as that taken by Mrs. Robert Fletcher and her son on a summer day in 1897. They bought train tickets to Enfield, boarded with their wheels, and pedaled home via the Ruddsboro Road.
Mrs. Fletcher was, no doubt, wearing a special costume with a split skirt of some kind. In the 1850’s, a few brave women who wished to be freed from their cumbersome skirts had ventured out in pantaloons, sometimes called “bloomers”, after their most famous proponent, Amelia Bloomer. But the style was widely considered scandalous as well as unbecoming, and it never caught on.
A story in the Gazette shows that forty years later the garment still had the power to shock. Miss Alice Maywood wrote about going out for a ride on her bicycle one day and stopping to speak to a young minister of the town. When he saw that she was wearing bloomers, he was rendered “too dazed for words”.
[This piece owes much to Clyde Dankert’s monograph, The Bicycle Comes to Hanover]
Teresa J. Oden
4/2017
Trees
It’s the time of year when we can’t help but notice the trees around us. Red, orange and yellow leaves are sprinkled over our hills. And there are many colorful trees down in the lowland area, which is Hanover’s population center these days. But Hanover Plain looks nothing at all like the land Eleazar Wheelock was shown, when he was looking for a place to build a school.
The Plain appealed to Wheelock because, in the 1760’s, there was nothing there but trees: he could build to suit. Hanover’s early settlers had chosen to build in higher areas, in Hanover Center and Etna. They still had to clear plenty of trees, but the ground was not so wet. On the Plain, the earth beneath the trees was like a sponge.
Wheelock immediately put a team to work to clear what he called the “horrid wilderness”. Later on, when a few rudimentary structures had been built and students began to arrive, Wheelock put them to work cutting wood. The earliest drawings of the Dartmouth Green show a rough clearing sprinkled with stumps. Those stumps disappeared very slowly. Each graduating class, for about fifty years, was assigned a stump to remove.
That tradition ended in 1820, but the final stump was not removed until 1836. The transformation was complete – almost. Though the land had dried up as the trees disappeared, but by 1836, the southeast end of the Green was still a swamp.
Teresa J. Oden
10/2016
Building Up Business
The beginnings of business in the Town of Hanover can be traced back to the construction, in 1769, of a gristmill beside Mink Brook, in what came to be called Mill Village. The gristmill, and the sawmill which soon followed, anchored the growth of a business district. In 1833 Ashel Packard put up a large building, a store with a meeting room overhead. Development continued, and in 1884 a post office was established. Because New Hampshire already had a town called Mill Village, the residents had to choose a different name. No one knows exactly why “Etna” was chosen, but the name, like the business district, has stuck.
In Hanover Village, there was no clear choice for a commercial district, but Eleazor Wheelock President of Dartmouth College, encouraged growth in certain areas. He granted a lot south of the Green to a physician, John Crane, who established a home, office and pharmacy on the site. Wheelock further seeded the areas to the south and west by granting lots to a barber, a hatter, a carpenter and a mason. On what we now know as Lebanon Street, brick and potash yards were established, and a tailor and a shoemaker set up shop. Captain Aaron Storrs built an inn southwest of the Green where Casque and Gauntlet now stands, and President Wheelock recognized him as the “official innkeeper”.
The business district seemed firmly rooted south and west of the Green, but competition sprouted to the north and east in 1772 when, much to Wheelock’s chagrin, John Payne opened an inn there. Some years later Richard Lang began selling general merchandise on a large scale, on the site where Webster Hall now sits.
Historian John King Lord calls Lang “the prince of business men”; he succeeded where everyone else failed. Lang’s story deserves a chapter of its own.
Teresa J. Oden
2/2017
The Danger of Fire
Fire came hand-in-hand with settlement: fire for heat, fire for light, fire for cooking and washing. In the early days, when a fire went out of control the only solution was buckets of water fetched from a stream or a well. Buildings were often lost, but that was accepted as a fact of life. Most structures were small and simple, easily replaced.
That was not the case with Dartmouth Hall. Finished in 1791, “the College” was a source of great pride, but also great concern. Each resident of the three-story wooden hall was required to place beside his bed, by 9 PM every evening, a bucket full of water. Still, everyone knew such precautions could not save the building if a flame took hold.
The density of settlement around the college had been increasing, along with concerns about a fire jumping from one property to the next. In 1792 Hanover citizens appointed three fire wardens. However, they were not yet ready to grant the wardens any substantial authority, such as the power to condemn a building or demand chimney repairs. Nor were they ready to allocate funds for fire protection. Buckets of water remained the only means of defense, and it would take several more decades – and several disastrous fires – for that to change.
Remarkably, the original Dartmouth Hall survived for 133 years. In 1904 it caught fire while the residents were in the college chapel and was leveled in less than two hours. In the end it was not a stove or a candle left unattended that caused the blaze but a more modern invention: electrical wiring.
Teresa J. Oden
1/2017
A Lost Village
Some time ago, a Hanover resident who had a nice crop of apples could take them across the bridge to Lewiston, Vermont, and have them pressed at the Sargent Coal and Wood Company, which had been repurposed as a cider mill. In the 1960’s Margaret Beck McCallum recalled the experience in one of her “By the Way” columns in the Hanover Gazette. You could bring your own apples, barter or trade. The site was “zesty with the autumn smell of apples… no cider ever tasted better.” But the small village of Lewiston was fighting to survive.
For many years Lewiston offered much more than autumn fragrances. Early on there were grist mills, saw mills and a tannery along Blood Brook, south of the bridge. After the railroad came through, coal trains unloaded coal and milk trains loaded milk. You could catch a passenger train at Lewiston, and with a change in White River Junction, ride all the way to New York City. On Saturday nights you could ride a special train called the “Peanut” which transported riders to the picture show. During the years of Prohibition a speakeasy called Buckets of Blood thrived north of the station. It was at the Lewiston depot that Franklin D. Roosevelt made a stop in the 1930’s, just as President Ulysses S. Grant had done, way back in 1869. In the 1940’s and ‘50’s you could stock your larder at Raycraft’s General Store, where you could also buy shoe grease and garters, mucilage and Mercurochrome.
Mills closed and commerce gradually shifted south. Trains gave way to trucks and automobiles. In the 1950’s the Wilder Dam put part of Lewiston under water, including the site of the log cabin which had been home, nearly two hundred years earlier, to Dr. Joseph Lewis, for whom the village was named.
Lewiston might have languished yet a while, but it was done in by eminent domain and I-91’s Exit 13 fifty years ago. The end was sudden, a matter of bulldozers and fire. “It was like watching prehistoric dragons go over the landscape,” said Norwich resident Nancy Dean. “It was terrifying.”
Progress, certainly…and yet, wouldn’t it be lovely to cross the river and smell those apples?
Teresa J. Oden
9/2017
Schools
Early settlers were keen to build school houses to provide for their children’s education. School districts were organized as needed, and residents in each district set their own taxes, which in the early years could be paid in bushels of wheat. They took turns boarding the teachers. By 1800 there were ten districts, and the number continued to grow. The last district, Number 18, was divided off from the Ruddsboro district in Etna in 1853; it served only three families, albeit large ones.
The typical school house was inadequate from the very beginning: heated by a single fireplace at one end of the building and equipped with nothing more than a chalkboard. Reference books, maps and globes were luxuries beyond reach in most cases. No one thought much about the need for maintenance or repairs. Teachers were qualified to teach reading, writing and arithmetic but were often young and inexperienced. From time to time a school would be plagued by “roughs” – older boys who delighted in disrupting the proceedings and chasing off a new teacher as quickly as possible. The college district had the biggest problem with rough boys.
At the other end of the spectrum were schools such as Mrs. Hubbard’s “Select Family School for Young Ladies”, which operated out of a family home on the edge of the Dartmouth campus. Select, indeed: a brochure from 1861 reveals that the school’s fees were 50% higher than college’s. These young ladies were powerfully attractive to Dartmouth men, but they were kept under tight supervision; Mrs. Hubbard’s school was known colloquially as “The Nunnery”.
For all their refinement, the boarding schools also generated some rough behavior. This was due to the fact that cadets from the military academy in Norwich competed with Dartmouth students for the young ladies’ attentions. Dartmouth men took to heading off cadets at the bridge, where they would attempt to tear brass buttons from their uniforms. Thus humiliated, the cadets would make a hasty retreat.
Teresa J. Oden
11/2016
The Sheep Craze
In 1853, George Dewey of Hanover entered some Merino sheep into a competition held by the state Agricultural Society. Dewey’s buck won first prize, but the judges weren’t happy with the way things had played out. The buck raised by George Cutting of Lyme was superior, but Cutting had not complied with all the rules. Even worse, there were fewer entries than ever. Farmers were losing interest in sheep.
Merino sheep were originally bred in Spain and Portugal and were kept under tight control for centuries. In the early 1800’s William Jarvis of Weathersfield, Vermont was allowed to purchase 4,000 as a special favor. The Merinos’ fine fleece quickly won over the region’s farmers.
Wool production in the U.S. boomed when the government put an embargo on British wool during the War of 1812. Prices rose, farmers prospered, and town populations grew. In 1840, Hanover’s human population passed 2,600, its highest point in the 19th century. The town was home to 11,000 sheep, many happily grazing where trees had stood just a few years before.
Further west, the Ohio Valley was offering pastures that were considerably greener. There a farmer could keep a flock for $.25 a head, while a year’s upkeep for a ewe on George Dewey’s Hanover farm might cost him as much as two dollars.
When the boom went bust in New England, most sheep pastures were put to other uses or were allowed to revert to forest. The fate of George Dewey’s farm was unique: it gave birth to the Dartmouth Medical School. A piece of the old farm still remains; we call it “Dewey Field”.
Teresa J. Oden
3/2017
The Great Hurricane of 1938
By the evening of September 21, 1938, it had been raining for days in the Upper Valley area. As night fell it looked like this storm might soon be added to the history books: the Great Flood of 1938. There was horrific news from hundreds of miles to the south, where a powerful hurricane was working its way up the coast after bringing death and devastation to Rhode Island and Long Island Sound. But locally, residents were only concerned about the rising streams and rivers all around them. Who ever heard of a hurricane in Hanover?
Then the trees began to toss. Unbeknownst to those who lay awake listening to the deafening howl of the wind, the hurricane that had brought tremendous catastrophe further south was headed right for them. It had made landfall near Bridgeport, Connecticut at about 4 PM and was tracking up the Connecticut River Valley at 50 miles per hour.
In Hanover the whipping winds continued through the night. Most people were safe in their beds, and there were few deaths in the state. But the morning light revealed that about half of the white pines in New Hampshire had been uprooted. The mass of timber that had to be cleared away was mind-boggling. In one night Mother Nature had mowed down about five times the number of logs that New England mills processed in an average year. Trees rested on cars and rooftops, but mostly they clogged the wooded areas. By springtime those woods could be a terrific fire hazard. The cleanup began immediately and at a backbreaking pace. There were no portable chain saws in 1938; the mess had to be cleared away with axes and crosscut saws. And then the question became, “What are we going to do with all this wood?”
The downed pines that appeared at first to pose a Herculean challenge gradually gave a boost to the Depression-era economy. The Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and other federal programs put people to work salvaging trees all over New England. When lumber mills could store no more logs, they were sunk in ponds to preserve them for future use. Much remained to be done by the time the snow melted in 1939, but the spring was a wet one, and fires never became an issue.
For nine years paper mills processed trees downed by the Hurricane of 1938, and in the end the stockpiles of lumber turned out to be a blessing. When the U.S. plunged into World War II, they stood ready to be made into the shipping crates that were needed for the war effort.
Teresa J. Oden
6/2020