home > news_and_events > news_articles >
Pine Park: The Wilderness Within
“The value to the College and the Town of this gift [of Pine Park] cannot be overestimated. It is one of the most beautiful natural spots in Hanover; the walk known as the Cathedral of Pines, the charming views of the river and hills from the mouth of the Vale, and the steep, pine-grown banks behind Occom Ridge are attractions seldom found within the limits of a college town. Protection against the possible denudation of this land for commercial purposes is now perpetually assured.”
—Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May 1913
“A dreary wilderness” was how an unnamed contemporary of Eleazar Wheelock described Dartmouth's environs in the late 1760s, according to an unsigned manuscript in Rauner Library. Historian and emeritus professor Jere Daniell '55 notes that “a howling wilderness” is the better-known appellation.
What a difference a century made. The wilderness—dreary, howling, or otherwise—receded some distance from Hanover between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Colonial forests that once boasted pines 270 feet tall with trunks five and six feet in diameter gave way to meadows, pastures, and fields. Trees that would have become the masts and spars of His Majesty's Navy were logged for houses and barns in the U.S. of A.
And yet the forest, ever tenacious, grew back. White pines “prefer abandoned cultivated land,” wrote J. B. Friday '82, in an essay on the ecology of the Dartmouth area. “Pine Park is an example; in the nineteenth century it was a potato field.” Such fields went fallow as the Midwest's wide-open spaces and relatively rock-free soils lured New England farmers away. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pine Park's spuds had given way to straight, tall stands of timber. Loggers took notice.
To preserve roughly ninety-one acres of forest along the banks of the Connecticut River from Ledyard Bridge to the mouth of the Vale of Tempe—and the Vale itself, a deep ravine stretching from the medical school to the river—a group of “public spirited citizens” formed the Pine Park Association in 1901, selling stock to buy the land. They raised $5,500 in all—of which Edward Tuck, of Tuck School fame, gave $1,000—and were able to purchase half the parcel. In 1912, Mrs. Emily Howe Hitchcock bequeathed from her estate the remaining 45 acres. The following year, they gave the land to Dartmouth and the Town of Hanover to manage jointly as a park.
Which they've done so well that Pine Park doesn't look managed, but rather like a piece of wilderness that civilization (and loggers) somehow overlooked. A single modest sign off to the right of the Hanover Country Club's eighteenth green (as one approaches from Rope Ferry Road) marks the entrance. From there a steep, narrow, switchback descent leads into the Vale of Tempe (“valley of time”). The name was bestowed by a 19th-century classics professor, perhaps in recognition of the sense of timelessness the terrain inspires, or perhaps the centuries it took meandering Girl Brook to create it. In summer, large ferns grow among superannuated trees and the occasional rotted, upended stump; the sense of primeval enclosure is complete. The view opens up on the right as the path rounds toward the Connecticut River. To the left, a thick stand of pines loiters graciously in the former potato field, their acidic cast-off needles keeping undergrowth at bay. The path—now wide enough to walk two abreast—concludes with a calf-enlarging climb up “Freshman Hill,” through a dense, dim grove of hemlocks. At the top, the sky over Dartmouth suddenly seems unusually big and brilliant. Just ahead, Occom Pond and the campus beckon.
Heads up, though. The final leg of the journey through Pine Park is between the third tee and fairway. A duffer with a hook could be dangerous!