Jigsaw for July 4: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/four-score-and-seven

This week, America turns 250, and naturally we look back to the founding. So it is worth remembering perhaps the most famous example of a nation looking back at itself. It did not happen on the Fourth of July, and it was not written in 1776.

Abraham Lincoln delivered it on a cold afternoon, November 19, 1863, on a Pennsylvania battlefield where a few months earlier thousands had died. He spoke for barely two minutes. He was fifty-four and looks older, the war written all over his face.

Here is the thing most people miss. The Gettysburg Address is itself a looking-back. Lincoln opens by reaching all the way to 1776. “Four score and seven years ago” is eighty-seven years, and 1863 minus 87 lands exactly on the Declaration of Independence. He was not counting from the Constitution. He was counting from the promise.

And then he does something quietly visionary. He does not treat that founding as finished. He calls the country a nation “dedicated to a proposition,” and a proposition is something you set out to prove, not a thing you already own. The proposition was that all men are created equal, words set down in 1776 by some men who owned other men. Lincoln knew the distance between the sentence and the country. He did not pretend it away. He called the work “unfinished,” and he handed it to the living.

That is the optimism buried in a speech given over fresh graves. A nation is not a finished thing to be guarded. It is a goal to be reached for, generation after generation, no matter the cost. The founders wrote the proposition. Everyone since has been asked to further it.

Here is the whole of it, 272 words, worth every one.

The Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And no, he did not scribble it on the back of an envelope on the train, whatever you were told in school. Here is the proof, in his own hand.

Page one of the earliest draft, on Executive Mansion stationery, in ink, written in Washington before he ever boarded the train. So much for the envelope on the way to Gettysburg.

Page two. There are five drafts in Lincoln’s hand. The speech is spare because he cut and cut, not because it fell out of the sky. A man who thought the country itself was unfinished work was not about to leave his own sentences unfinished either.

The men who wrote “all men are created equal” did not live up to it. Neither, fully, have we. Lincoln’s answer was not to lower the bar but to keep the country dedicated to reaching it. Two hundred and fifty years on, that may be the most useful idea the founding ever produced.

Cameron Cross

Sources: Lincoln portrait by Alexander Gardner, November 1863, Library of Congress. The Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s hand (Nicolay copy), Library of Congress. Declaration of Independence, U.S. National Archives. All public domain.

Jigsaw for June 28, 2026:https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/true-to-the-declaration

“The American Declaration of Independence illustrated. An idealistic call for emancipation of the slaves. Borne aloft by an eagle holding two American flags is an aerial carriage similar to the basket of a hot-air balloon with two occupants: a black man who is a freed slave, his broken shackles falling to the ground at left, and a white man who proclaims, "Break every Yoke; let the oppressed go free." The eagle, like his counterpart on the arms of the United States, has wings spread and holds olive branches in his left talon. Here he also holds oak branches in his right. Above his head is a burst of light with the verses: "My rays, where'er on earth they strike, / Fall on the black and white alike; / That government alone is free,/ Which blesses all alike like me. The flags have the mottoes "All Men Are Created Equal" and "Stand by the Declaration." Below the carriage is a large crowd of people of all ages. Prominent are a Union soldier, a newsboy hawking the Boston "Herald" (left), and a free black man. Longer verses appear to the left and right of the carriage, espousing on moral and historical grounds the emancipation of the slaves. One reads: A man is a man howe'er dark his skin, /A heart that is human is beating within, / God regards not his colour – and neither should we, / Then unchain' the Negro – and let him go free.”

Source:
https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/YC2004665361/The-American-Declaration-of-Independence-illustrated

From an excellent New York Times essay about the words of the Declaration:

”The genius of the document lies not in the original, local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that later generations have projected onto it.

This week’s jigsaw: https://curioustorian-cattle-boat-1910.netlify.app

Nine men squint at the camera on the deck of a cattle boat in June 1910, somewhere between Boston and London. Six of them are Dartmouth students working their passage to Europe. Two are English cockney crew. The young man behind the camera, Malcolm R. Lovell, had just graduated from Williston Academy and was on his way to see the world before college.

He never learned the six students’ names.

In 1910, signing on as a cattleman was a cheap way for a Dartmouth man to reach Europe. You showed up at the Boston or Montreal docks in your roughest clothes, signed on as an “ordinary seaman,” and for the next ten or fourteen days you fed, watered, and shoveled up after six hundred British-bound steers. The pay was nominal. The point was the passage. Many students did it.

A 1925 Dartmouth man, Charles Haywood, wrote it up for the Alumni Magazine in 1956. His cattle foreman, a “little gray-headed man with a red nose, a lush mustache and a hatchet,” boomed up and down the decks shouting “England this day expects every man to do his duty.” Bunks were coffin-sized. The cattle got seasick at the same time the men did.

Lovell kept his negative for almost fifty years. In December 1959, writing from Coral Gables, Florida, he mailed the photograph to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine under the heading “Who Are They?” He guessed the six students belonged to the classes of 1912, 1913, or 1914, and asked any reader who recognized a face to write to him. He offered to mail prints to any of the men still living.

We don’t know if anyone wrote back.

Sixteen years later, eight men from the Dartmouth class of ‘27 made the same kind of crossing. Half a century after that, the six still living were all serving as Alumni Fund class agents for their class. Their head agent wrote one line about his old shipmates: “Right fine people, these cattlemen.”

If you recognize a great-grandfather here, the Dartmouth Library would love to hear from you. So would I.

Cameron Cross

Sources:

Photograph by Malcolm R. Lovell, June 1910. Held by Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.

Charles F. Haywood ‘25, “Cattle Boat,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, February 1956.

Erwin B. Paddock, “1927” class notes, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May 1980.

Dartmouth held its first graduation in 1771. And I’d always heard the line: Wentworth had a road built so he could go to Dartmouth’s first graduation.

Not quite true. For that first commencement, in August 1771, the road didn’t exist yet. Governor Wentworth and a party of about sixty had to come by a wildly roundabout route: north to his estate at Wolfeboro, then down through Haverhill, camping by the open road several nights in a row. It was that miserable trip that sent him home determined to cut a near-straight route from his Wolfeboro estate to Hanover — the Wolfeboro Road (you’ll also see it called the Governor’s Road) — which wasn’t finished until the second commencement, in 1772. So he did build a road for Dartmouth. Just not in time for the graduation everyone gives it credit for. Parts of it are still town roads you can drive today… but that’s a whole other post.

In my mind I’d always pictured Wentworth’s party as part of something smaller ceremony but still traditional and solemn — caps and gowns and such. The reality was rougher: a brand-new college in a clearing, four graduates handed plain slips of paper (the trustees lacked a quorum to grant real degrees), and a governor who’d basically just been camping.

And it’s easy to forget what that clearing was for. Dartmouth’s 1769 charter named the “education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes,” and the “Indian” stayed woven through the college’s traditions for two centuries — right down to the Sachem Oration, a commencement-season fixture that ran into the 1960s before quietly retiring along with the rest of Dartmouth’s Indian symbolism. More to explore about Dartmouth’s commitment to their charter.

The ceremony did grow up. By June 1953, President Eisenhower stood at Dartmouth’s commencement and told the graduates “Don’t join the book burners” — a quiet jab at Senator McCarthy that made national news — before a crowd of some 10,000. Forty-odd years later, in June 1995, Bill Clinton gave the address out on Memorial Field — which seats about 11,000 today, down from roughly 22,000 in its bigger days — in a soaking rain.

Which brings me to this week’s two photographs. Both come from the Bema — Dartmouth’s outdoor amphitheater in the pines — at ceremonies around 1910: straw boaters, women in long white dresses with parasols, men in dark suits and high collars. The figure standing on the rock with his arms raised, in the larger one, is giving the blessing. Back then the Bema hosted both graduation itself and Class Day, and I can’t tell you for certain which one each photo caught.

Play this week’s two puzzles → — two photos, so two puzzles; scroll past the first to find the second.

Today the Bema is still there in the woods on the north side of campus, a beautiful calm place amidst a busy campus and town. But the seniors graduate down on the Green.

Full-size images, if you’d like to study them: Photo 1 · Photo 2

Cameron Cross
for the Norwich Historical Society

———

Sources — Photographs: Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth (PhotoFiles). Eisenhower’s “book burners” address: Dartmouth. Clinton’s 1995 commencement: The American Presidency Project. The Governor’s Road: Rauner Library. The Sachem Oration: Dartmouth Archives.

Somehow I managed to make two posts last week,for a reason that made sense at the time. There was no second puzzle. Until now.

Jigsaw for June 7, 2026: Stockholm, Sweden, 1950 At a congress of physiologists, scientists from around the world being arranged for their conference group portrait.

I put all of the Vermont town panoramas together in a video. No soundtrack yet; play your own.

Thanks for reading,

Cam

Jigsaw for May 30, 2026: White River Junction, August 1915

The full panorama, looking north from the south-facing hillside above town:

Original Photo for saving or zooming
(Library of Congress, no known restrictions on publication)

Note the brick building with twin towers, slightly left of center. That’s the Junction House. It was renamed the Hotel Coolidge in 1924 and burned three months later. The Hotel Coolidge we know now is its 1925 replacement.

At the far left of the panorama, the cleared hillside drops down to where I91 now crosses over the White River. (For more on that view: West Lebanon and White River Junction and Part 2.)

I had it colorized; some people will prefer it. The white line down the middle is where the rotating lens passed itself mid-arc. (More on that strange camera here.)

This is the first of a small project. Between 1912 and 1917 a Brooklyn photographer named Henry Barreuther made at least eighteen of these of Vermont towns, plus a Connecticut and Massachusetts handful. The Library of Congress has kept them all, and we’ll be working through them this summer.

Next week, a follow-up on the strange camera itself.

Cameron Cross

for the

Norwich Historical Society

You may have already seen a Cirkut panorama without knowing it. The cabinet-sized device that produced this whole genre — group portraits like the one above, sweeping views of railroad yards, even hundreds of soldiers in a single frame — was patented in 1904 by William J. Johnston and built by the Folmer and Schwing division of Eastman Kodak. The halo is an artifact from the original scanning. The original print had no halo. And no, it’s not a wormhole into the space/time continuum.

Here's what one looked like:

A clockwork motor rotated the whole camera on its tripod. A slit at the back of the lens housing exposed a vertical column of film at a time, while a reel of long, paper-backed film fed past the slit, synchronized with the rotation. One squeeze of the bulb committed you to the entire sweep. You could not stop mid-arc.

The film came out in inches, not millimeters. Five, six and a half, eight, ten, even sixteen inches wide. The Library of Congress holds a 1906 Cirkut of Washington that runs twenty feet.

The Cirkut survived in commercial use into the 1940s. You can still see a working one occasionally, like in this 1950 setup in Stockholm:

The format had quirks. A person who moved during the sweep smeared. The classic trick was for the assistant to walk along behind the rotation, so they appeared at both ends of a group portrait. And if the sun was on one side of the arc, that side blew out the exposure. The Cirkut did not edit. It recorded the long, awkward, beautiful truth of what it saw.

The Cirkut took countless famous American panoramas — class photos, military reviews, baseball teams, town views. One example of that work is in this week's puzzle: a panorama of White River Junction, August 1915, photographed by a Brooklyn man named Henry Barreuther.

For the full rabbit hole: Cirkut on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirkut_(camera)), and the enthusiast site at cirkut.org.

Cameron Cross

for the

Norwich Historical Society

Jigsaw for May 24, 2026: Ledyard Bridge, Now in Color

View looking south at the Ledyard Bridge probably in the later 1800s. This was originally a “pre-Curioustorian” email-only puzzle, over a year old. I had it colorized; some people find it more engaging. Probably not Historians, though!

Note Mt. Ascutney in the far background and Lewiston just to the right of the bridge.

I found the now-wooded location by reconnoitering. (Or is that “connoitering” since I was doing it for the first time?). It’s on a dramatic knob just west of the railroad crossing on River Road in Norwich.

Worth noting: stand there today and you see exactly nothing of the bridge. The trees have closed the view entirely. Mother Nature bats last.

Original b/w Photo

For more on the Ledyard Bridge, see Dave Calloway's excellent post in the Norwich Times.

Cameron Cross

Jigsaw for May 17, 2026: Capt. Alden Partridge

Dave Callaway has a wonderful deeper look at his hiking prowess at the Norwich Times, starting on page 17

Stylized painting that hangs in the Norwich University Library in Northfield. Based on an 1842 lithograph. Behind him are the North and South Barracks on the original Norwich, Vermont campus. The Marion Cross School sits about where the North Barracks were (left).

If you live in Norwich, you know the name Alden Partridge. He founded the school that became Norwich University, and on its own that would be enough for one historical marker. But the more you read, the more Partridge there is. He had been superintendent of West Point. He served in the Vermont legislature. He spent his life arguing that a free republic should be defended by trained citizens rather than a standing professional army. To borrow Whitman’s line, the man contained multitudes.

Today I want to talk about just one of them: Partridge the walker.

His reputation as a pedestrian was prodigious, and I will admit I never quite appreciated it until I watched the recent Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution.

What stayed with me was not just the battles. It was also the walking: the sheer distances ordinary people covered on foot, because before the railroads that was simply how you got anywhere. Partridge took that everyday skill and pushed it to an extreme. For instance:

1. He walked the 110 miles from Norwich to Williamstown, Massachusetts, climbed Mount Greylock, and walked home again. The whole 220-mile round trip took four days.

2. In his mid-forties, he made the round trip to the summit of Mount Monadnock and back: 152 miles in three days.

3. On another outing he covered 300 miles round trip, finishing with a 64-mile push on the final day.

4. He once led a corps of pack-laden cadets from Norwich to Manchester and back, more than 150 miles, covering 45 miles on one of the days. Teenage boys, on foot, keeping his pace.
   
   Dave Callaway has a wonderful deeper look at his hiking prowess at the Norwich Times, starting on page 17. He includes an account of a casual hike from Norwich to the top of Mt. Ascutney and back….all in a single day.
   
   As I said: multitudes. This won’t be the last we hear of Alden Partridge. There is a great deal more about him than I ever realized.
   
   Thanks for reading!
   
   Cameron Cross

Jigsaw for May 10, 2026: The Rover

It’s the time of year when we’re seeing bicycles everywhere as cyclists are eager to be back in the saddle after being sidelined during the ice and snow.

I was curious as to how the bicycle has evolved since its beginnings, and was delightfully fascinated by what I found.

The term “Penny Farthing” came from the British coins of the era: the penny was very large and the farthing very small. However, this is more of a modern term. During their heyday they were known simply as “Bicycles.”

I started here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny-farthing

http://www.barthaynes.com/the-history-of-the-penny-farthing/

During this time, penny-farthings, also known as ordinaries or high wheelers today, were only for the upper middle class and high society. Many bike clubs in Britain were extremely picky when it came to who they admitted. All members of leagues needed an official recommendation from a current member and a costly uniform.

In 1878, Albert Pope began to manufacture the Columbia bicycle and did so successfully for two decades in America. After this, the penny-farthing trend died down and gave way to John Kemp Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle of 1885 (see puzzle) that more closely resembles the modern bicycle.

The penny-farthings are now a symbol of the Victorian era and a milestone in the launching of cycling as a sport. They are intriguing, and I hope to ride one someday.

Or not.

I have a feeling I might have a similar experience as Mark Twain had:

“When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can balance the machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it, then comes your next task — how to mount it. You do it in this way: you hop along behind it on your right foot, resting the other on the mounting-peg, and grasping the tiller with your hands. At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your left leg, hang your other one around in the air in a general and indefinite way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off. You get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times.

By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also to steer without wrenching the tiller out by the roots (I say tiller because it is a tiller; “handle-bar” is a lamely descriptive phrase). So you steer along, straight ahead, a little while, then you rise forward, with a steady strain, bringing your right leg, and then your body, into the saddle, catch your breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that, and down you go again.”

Some local photos:

Also of interest:

Pictures of an Aroostook County man’s homemade one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede

https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/jkstarley/

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/top10facts/855278/Ten-facts-Penny-Farthings-supper-club-event-London-high-wheel-bicycle

Early penny-farthing riders in American were known as “Wheelmen”.

Nearly seventy car makers began as bicycle manufacturers: Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC, to name a few.

The world record for distance ridden in an hour on a penny-farthing is 23.72 miles set in 1891.

Thomas Stevens was the first person to cycle across the United States on a penny-farthing, completing the journey from San Francisco to Boston in 1884. Whew!

Thanks for reading, as always.

Support your local historians!

Cameron Cross
for the
Norwich Historical Society

Jigsaw for May 3, 2026: St.-Gauden’s Little Studio

After my Maxfield Parrish post, I wanted to turn to his friend and Cornish Colony inspiration, Augustus St.-Gaudens.

I have visited his home Aspet many times. Like many of Parrish’s works, it always seems like a place with its own reality.

I first chose one of his famous works as the puzzle subject. Then I found the photo of his studio, which works perfectly for a jigsaw puzzle: striking individual pieces that combine to become a work of art in itself. No expanses of sky, vegetation, or background.

In 1885, Saint-Gaudens first rented what had been the Blow-Me-Down Farm. Seven years later he purchased the property, naming it after his father’s birthplace in France. Over the next 15 years, he transformed it into a thriving estate with gardens, a swimming pool, bowling green, and studio spaces where he created major works. He even developed a 9-hole, "cow-pasture" style golf course.

His year-round residence began in 1900.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens died in 1907, just after finishing the designs for the $20 Saint-Gaudens Gold Double Eagle coin. His widow, Augusta (!) Saint-Gaudens, established the Saint-Gaudens Memorial to maintain the site. It opened to the public in 1926.

Discover more: Interactive Map of Saint-Gaudens’ work
and Visitors' Photos, a sampling from TripAdvisor

Thanks for reading…

Cameron Cross

Puzzle for April 16, 2026: Daybreak

Maxfield Parrish created dream-like idyllic worlds. He often began with a photograph of a staged scene using family and friends.

And to think he did a lot of his work as part of the Cornish Colony, right here in Plainfield, NH.

I always get a kick out of proudly proclaiming
“Winston Churchill lived at the Cornish Colony!”

No, not that Winston Churchill.

Learn about the "father" of the Colony, Augustus St. Gaudens

Enjoy these other paintings in the same vein:

Learn more:

• Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park

• “Daybreak” on Wikipedia

• Many more works by Parrish
  
  Thanks for reading. Volunteer at your local historical society!

  
  Cameron Cross

Jigsaw for April 19, 2026 Phineas Gage

Many of us have heard of Phineas Gage and his famous construction accident in Cavendish, Vermont.

The gist of the story is that he survived an iron bar going through his head. That alone has fascinated people around the world and generated scholarly articles for over 170 years.

I had always pictured a man with a bar sticking out the top and bottom of his skull. But the reality is that the tamping iron blew completely through his head and landed several yards away. Phineas was helped (not carried!) into a cart, and brought into town.

Shortly thereafter, a Dr. Edward Williams arrived to find Phin. Gage sitting upright on the piazza of Mr. Adams’ hotel with a hole through his skull, calmly telling bystanders what had happened to him.

I remembered him quoted: “I’m going to need some doctoring.”

The actual line was: “Doctor, here is business enough for you.” By his own account, he never even lost consciousness.

The follow-up story, as most of us learned it, is that he survived but his personality was forever changed. He became irascible, unlikable, and “indulged at times in the grossest profanity.” But looking into it again now, it turns out those accounts were written by Dr. Harlow twenty years after the fact. And the change didn’t last his whole life.

In the years that followed, Gage worked at the Dartmouth Inn’s livery stable in Hanover, living in Lebanon. In 1852, he was recruited to work in Chile, where he drove a six-horse stagecoach on a 13-hour, 100-mile journey over rough mountain roads from Valparaiso to Santiago.

He stayed for nearly eight years, until the railroad came through. He returned to live with his parents in San Francisco, and died of epilepsy complications the next year, in his 36th year.

If you’re steady enough to handle a six-horse team on mountain roads in South America for that long, you’re probably pretty much in control of your faculties. The myth of a permanent change of character, repeated until quite recently, did him a disservice. What he went through looks a lot like what doctors see in brain injury patients today: impulse problems, a shorter fuse, difficulty reading social cues.

There’s a lot to read about Phineas Gage.

To explore further, visit some of my sources:

• Phineas Gage’s Story — University of Akron

• Harvard Neuro Blog discussion

• “Then Again” VTDigger

• Phineas Gage’s Great Legacy — NIH PMC

• Phineas Gage — Wikipedia

• A few chapters of Malcolm Macmillan’s “An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage,” the definitive scholarly book

• Extensive archive at Harvard

• Everything You Know About Phineas Gage Is Wrong
  Some new facts, including his time P.T. Barnum’s “freakshow “museum in New York

  
  Phineas was born in Lebanon, injured in Cavendish, recovered in Lebanon, worked in Hanover. I think of him every time I drive to Okemo.
  
  Finally, a psychology professor and his students made a stop-motion Lego movie recreating the accident.
  
  Of course they did.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Support the Curioustorian

Cameron Cross

Voluteer at your local historical society.

Jigsaw for April 12, 2026: Dublin Corner

This week’s puzzle features a colorized postcard c. 1907 showing the intersection of Justin Morrill Highway and the Old City Falls Road looking southwest. This was known locally as “Dublin Corner.”

As detailed in John Freitage’s wonderful article, some thought it may have been a little cluster of Irish settlers. John spoke with Suzanne Lupien, who farms with draft horses. She told him that the hill heading toward Vershire on Old City Falls Road was so steep that wagons needed to put on an extra team of horses. Hence “Doublin’ Corner.”

Seeking to verify, John asked around.

And that little building still standing on the corner? It was once Frank West’s tinsmith shop — the Strafford Historical Society tells its story.

Thanks to John Freitag for the inspiration, and you for your interest and support.

Cameron Cross

Big crowd for Lebanon! At that time the population was a little over 3,000.

Passengers arriving at the Lebanon Depot, en route to the racetrack.

I knew that a racetrack existed in the Riverdale neighborhood, thinking it was for horse and harness racing. Turns out there was a lively stock car racing scene there into the Fifties, and countless other events through the years

Many pictures on this Facebook page
Many more photos of Stock Car racing in the Fifties

Enjoy!

The Curioustorian

Here’s your Sunday jigsaw: https://jigex.com/dE7GX

The 1922 Dartmouth Winter Carnival saw the first competition on the newly constructed jump overlooking the 13th green of the Hanover Country Club golf course.

The tradition continued until 1985, when the NCAA dropped ski jumping. It was torn down in 1993.

The competition attracted thousands of spectators, as evidenced by this photo from 1934.

Note the crowd at the top of the hillside, as well as the stylish skiing garb.

Photos courtesy of Dartmouth College

Cameron Cross

for the

Norwich Historical Society

Jigsaw for March 29, 2026: https://jigex.com/DKE1L

In the original photo below, you can see the 1906 team on Memorial Field, before the current football stadium and Red Rolfe Field were built.

Crosby Street runs behind the grandstand, and the street beyond the flagpole is East Wheelock. See if you can spot some buildings that are still standing.

See more early uniforms here:
Dartmouth Baseball's early "Sartorial Splendor"

See a timeline and history of Dartmouth baseball
in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine archive

Thanks for reading. I welcome your questions and comments.
Please pass this along to any baseball fans you know

Thanks for reading,

Cameron Cross

The White Owl Diner in Lebanon, NH in the 1960s.

A vintage 1932 Worcester Lunch Car, it was purchased that year and re-christened The White Owl Diner in the early 1930s. It survived the 1964 Lebanon fire, before being demolished for the new bridge on Route 120 as part of the make-over of Hough Square in 1970.

A 1964 Lebanon Fire: 60th Anniversary film from the Lebanon Historical Society’s director Nicole Ford Burley is worth your while.

Here's that now-changed intersection on Google Street View:

Other photos of interest:

Cameron Cross

Other Sources:

https://dinerhotline.wordpress.com/tag/white-owl-diner/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/lebhistoricalsociety/posts/1993017307860297/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/lebhistoricalsociety/posts/1148611112300925/

Try this week’s jigsaw puzzle: https://jigex.com/B6n2v

Dirt roads are everywhere hereabouts. We had a preview this week of the big mud to come.

Imagine how it was in the 1920s, when fewer than 10% of Vermont roads were paved.

Many farmers simply stayed home and worked making maple sugar, mostly, not syrup.

Even today in Vermont, most towns have many more miles of dirt roads than paved roads.

A few nearby towns illustrate the point:

Norwich — Total mileage: 113 | Dirt mileage: 63
Strafford — Total mileage: 80 | Dirt mileage: 66
Thetford — Total mileage: 99 | Dirt mileage: 52

But then there are exceptions:

Hartford — Total mileage: 159 | Dirt mileage: 43 (it’s practically “urban”)

Look up other Vermont towns:
https://vtransmaps.vermont.gov/Maps/Publications/Surface_byCountyTown.pdf

If you think your road is bad, consider:

Happy traveling,

Cameron Cross
The Curioustorian