Mt. Moosilauke (1826) - Dartmouth College, The Way It Used to Be
An Excerpt from Old Sam's Thunder by Jack Noon
". . . Getting away from his bellringing responsibilities had been a welcome relief, but Sewall Tenney missed his friends and was homesick for Dartmouth College. Bell rope or not, he loved living in room 10 on the third floor of The College. Twenty-seven students out of a total of one hundred seventy-four lived in The College, the only Dartmouth-owned building of note aside from the chapel and New Commons.
New Commons stood just to the northwest of The College and housed students. Although its original function had been to feed students, New Commons had ceased serving its legendarily poor food a decade earlier. Unending complaints about the alleged food had led Dartmouth to cease providing meals and to allow all students to make whatever eating arrangements they wanted. The boys rooming in New Commons (and in the privately owned Brown Hall next door) claimed that on rainy days they could still smell the ghosts of the carrion and corpses served as food to earlier Dartmouth classes. Many students arranged to take their board in various village homes, but some - Sewall included - cooked in their own rooms.
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 and was the envy of all the Dartmouth students who took their lodgings downstairs in the same building, in Brown Hall or New Commons, in Hanover private homes, or in the huge and rambling brick building, known as the Tontine, in the middle of the village. . . ."
Note: You can read more about rustic Dartmouth College in the early 19th century in Jack Noon's historical novel, Old Sam's Thunder (1998)." - RWA
