Mt. Moosilauke (1826) - Dartmouth - Bedbug Alley
An Excerpt from Old Sam's Thunder by Jack Noon
". . . All lectures and recitations took place in the building known, somewhat confusingly, as The College. It held the meager Dartmouth library along with what was left of the college museum. The third floor, where Sewall lived, was known as Bedbug Alley. . . .
Sewall interrupted his musings to put more wood into the stove. It was wonderful having so much wood and being able to keep the room continually warm as long as he stayed up and kept putting in the logs. At Dartmouth the firewood situation was impossible. Whenever he bought wood from the farmers who hauled it in daily on wagons or sledges, he had to carry it all the way up to the third floor of The College. There was no leaving it outdoors, even marked with his name on a sign, or it disappeared overnight. If he went out to try to find windfalls to haul back from the already well-gleaned countryside, it meant many long trips without much wood to show for his exertions. It would have been full-time work in itself. It was far easier to buy wood, but most students had little money to spare and kept their eyes open for wood they didn't have to buy.
Every student room in The College had a newly installed stove, and each stove had to be fed wood
constantly in the colder months if the room's occupants were to have any comfort. A stick of wood
"borrowed" from the stack in any room whose occupants were temporarily absent would soon enough burn down to ashes and be completely untraceable as evidence. Firewood thieves generally had to be caught in the act of stealing to be proven guilty.
The exception had come when Levi Bartlett had bored into a stick of firewood, filled the hole with black powder, plugged it, and set it on top of the pile in his room. A pair of sophomores down on the second floor soon thereafter had requested a new stove from Dartmouth because theirs had "fallen apart." They'd had to pay for its replacement. Later, however, Levi's own stove had "fallen apart," and he himself had had to buy a new one. All the Bedbug Alley boys had a mutual firewood truce and hauled - and burned - their own wood, but there was no trusting the boys downstairs either on the first or second floors.
It was a luxury for Sewall now in Barston Falls* to have a nearly unlimited supply of dry wood out in the deacon's shed and not to have to haul it up any flights of stairs. . . ."
* If you haven't discovered Barston Falls - it's north of Fairlee and south of Bradford, Vermont - you'll enjoy reading The Big Fish of Barston Falls and Old Sam's Thunder. - RWA
