Class of 1897
BOUNDED ON THE WEST
In the years 1893 to 1897, Hanover was bounded on the west by Norwich Station and by Noridge Plain. There was nothing beyond. At the Plain, a fraternity banquet at the Norwich Inn was as far as society ever expected to go. It was an academic town also, for there remained one threestory brick building which once helped to house Norwich University and in which Dartmouth students taught winter schools. My roommate, Jack Frost '96, taught there one winter, and as a partial result, Dartmouth gained three notable members of the class of '99, Warren Kendall, John Wood, and Bill Hutchinson.
There was also near the village, Bloody Brook, where a grist mill had burned and left bags of rotting grain, whose distillerylike stench still clings to my memory. Near the station by the roadside was a bank from which clay stones of marvelous shape could be dug. Experience here later led Henderson to his North Dakota love of prospecting for gold. There was a minister too with modest and attractive daughters on whom A. P. Watson used to call.
There was a hill back of the village over which Charles H. Richardson and I, botanists of a sort under Auntie Jesup, roamed to find rare ferns and squirrel corn and brought them home, mutilated and dying. Richardson became a great scientist in the field of geology. A professor in Syracuse University I believe. I declare that he was a perfect scholar in the laboratory and an adventurous friend in the woods, but one summer when I was studying in Hanover, I heard him preach twice in the White Church. Since then I have had no belief in the transfer of training. A wise geologist may in the pulpit be the producer of unbroken dullness, and this too in the college church which for years had held an unsurpassed record in this particular. On that botany trip, we did not go beyond the first hill, since Hanover's western horizon was but three miles away. All beyond that was unexplored and probably uninhabitable.
Then there was the Norwich and Hanover station. On my first trip to Hanover the train stopped at White River Junction and I came on to this station on a hand car. I was a guest of the track men when we left the Junction, but was section boss before we reached Norwich.
I have not mentioned Ledyard Bridge, but in many years I never sniffed at a New Hampshire town meeting without recalling this ancient structure. Dear to us was this Norwich Station, for at it we descended as freshmen and from it we were taken southward after graduation. Sometimes "100 students came in on a single train," each with a tin-covered trunk. In such days Howe's stages would convey only passengers, and the trunks were later distributed from farm wagons. My father was a prosperous New England farmer who sent his sons to Dartmouth and paid the tuition in cash and not in produce, but Hamp's coaches embarrassed me. I would not waste the money for coach fare and I was afraid that if I walked, I would be despised for poverty, so with my hand bag, a canvas telescopic one, I would make a quick start so as to get to the top of the hill before my wealthier friends, such as Ralph James and Ned Woodworth, passed me in coach luxury, or I would wait until the coaches were gone and the road clear. I was not alone in these humiliating hikes. Semp Smith, John Meserve, and Winfield Temple walked also, and said it was because they needed the exercise. Sometimes we would follow a definite path where now is Tuck Drive to escape derision. It is terrible to be poor or stingy as we were in 1896.
THEODORE BACON
Theodore Bacon spent the summer in study at the Teachers College of Connecticut. His specialty is adult education, and he is director of this work for the public school department of Danbury, Conn.
GEORGE TENT
It was a surprise and a most happy one that Tent, whom so few of us have seen in many years, from his home in Hatchville, Mass., came to the reunion. It is an affliction to be deaf, but except in this particular Tent seemed to us unchanged. Trim, well-dressed, a gentleman in appearance and demeanor, we rejoiced to see him once more and to hear him declare that if we set a reunion for each year, he would never miss another.
JOHN KEATING
John Francis Keating is a leading citizen in Stamford, Conn. He is a judge and has been mayor of the city. He has a young daughter, Mary, and a young lawyer son whose Dartmouth class was 1930.
SUMNER SARGENT
After thirty vigorous years in the Congregational ministry, Sargent has become a proprietor of a variety store, first at Hampton Beach and now for some time at Newburyport, Mass. The son, Theron, was educated at New Hampshire University and Franklin Union in Boston. The store is at 269 Merrimac St. and the home at 11 Plummer Ave.
Secretary, State Capitol, Hartford, Conn.
