Commencement at the Bema
Dartmouth graduates this weekend — two photographs from the days when the whole ceremony still fit in the woods.
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 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 committment 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, 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
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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.