This article is featured in the 2024 Homecoming Special Issue.
Every Homecoming Friday, students gather on the Green for one of the College’s most celebrated traditions: the bonfire. Dating back more than 100 years, the tradition welcomes new students to campus and unites the Dartmouth community.
Since its establishment in 1888, the bonfire has undergone several changes, from structural overhauls for safety reasons to shortening the length of bonfire celebrations. While various Town officials have overseen the tradition — from the Hanover Fire Department to the Hanover Police Department — the College administration has also played a vital part in its evolution.
“The bonfire is a dear tradition,” Safety and Security director Keysi Montás said. “It means so much for our community, and we want to maintain that and do it in a safe manner.”
The Dartmouth set out to investigate the College and Town administrations’ roles in the storied tradition.
From A Baseball Win to a College-Sponsored Event
The first bonfire was lit 136 years ago to celebrate a victorious baseball game against a team from Manchester, N.H., according to documents from the Rauner Special Collections Library. The night of the celebration, students — freshmen and upperclassmen alike — scoured the town for combustible material. In their pursuit of something to burn, the students “disturbed the slumbers of a peaceful town, destroyed some property, made the boys feel that they were men and in fact did no one any good,” The Dartmouth reported in 1979.
Bonfires celebrating baseball victories continued to be held in subsequent years, according to past reporting by The Dartmouth. Eventually, however, the tradition evolved. Seven years after the first bonfire, in 1895, then-College President William Jewett Tucker ’61 recognized “Dartmouth Night” as an annual ceremony. The first Dartmouth Night bonfire took place on Sept. 17, 1895 and incorporated speeches from College faculty and presidents, including Tucker. Tucker said the event was intended to “promote class spirit and … initiate freshmen into the community.”
The bonfire had now become an official College tradition.
In the following years, the bonfire continued to evolve. In 1904, William Heneage Legge, the Sixth Earl of Dartmouth, visited the College to lay the cornerstone of the second Dartmouth Hall. Hoping to make a lasting impression on Legge, students marched around a bonfire, kicking off another tradition: running around the fire.
New Sport, New Structure
While the bonfire was initially a baseball celebration, it soon became associated with the football program, according to past reporting by The Dartmouth. After the construction of Memorial Field in 1923, College President Ernest Hopkins spoke at the stadium, before students proceeded to the Green for a bonfire.
By the 1950s, the College began scheduling the bonfire for the same weekend as the Homecoming football game — a tradition that remains true today.
In 1950, Dartmouth students also introduced a new bonfire structure: the fire was constructed in a stable hexagon with a superstructure of ties. Like the date change, this design became the basis for all future bonfire structures, according to past reporting by The Dartmouth.
Traditionally, the number of tiers in the bonfire was equivalent to the freshman class’s graduating year. The Class of 1979, however, built the bonfire to 100 tiers, causing the bonfire to be so hot that students and alumni fled from the Green, according to past reporting by The Dartmouth. Consequently, the College was forced to look into imposing additional regulations on height limit and structure.
These regulations included limiting the structure’s height to 60 feet and transitioning to eco-friendly wood, according to past reporting by The Dartmouth. The College replaced the creosote-soaked railroad ties with environmentally-friendly cut timber. Much to the dismay of that year’s students, however, the structure did not burn when it was lit — remaining completely upright the next morning.
Safety Incidents
In 1999, a bonfire at Texas A&M University collapsed during its construction, resulting in the deaths of 12 students and injuries of 27 more. As a result, the Dartmouth administration took additional precautions during the construction the following year, The Dartmouth reported in 2022. According to a Valley News article from the Rauner Special Collections Library, new precautions included hiring a consultant who analyzed the A&M bonfire accident, having an ambulance ready at the construction site, requiring students to use ladders rather than climb the structure itself, using a forklift to deliver the wood — instead of students pulling it up by rope — and limiting the number of students permitted to work on the fire’s construction.
In addition to structural concerns, the College had to worry about a new safety issue caused by students: freshmen attempting to touch the bonfire. Since the 1990s, the College has seen an increase in attempts to touch the fire — a move meant to avoid being labeled the “worst class ever” by upperclassmen, The Dartmouth reported in 2018.
In 2016, this tradition resulted in serious injury. According to Montás, more than 50 students broke through the caution tape in an attempt to touch the fire.
“A number of people … ran out of control and tried to touch the fire,” he said. “Some of them were successful. One slid and almost went under the fire. … And [after that night], I said, ‘This cannot go on.’ When that happens as a safety-security person in this institution, I feel like a failure. I feel horrible.”
According to engineering professor and current bonfire designer Douglas Van Citters ’99, the 2016 incident prompted discussions between the College and the Town of Hanover about the safety of the event. A committee was then created, made up of “people from student life, alumni relations, facilities … the police department … and the fire department,” according to Conferences and Events logistics director Jim Alberghini.
The next year, in 2017, the Town required a collapse zone that was one and one-half times the height of the fire, according to Alberghini. As decided by the committee, the collapse zone was encircled by a six-foot temporary chain link fence, beyond which Dartmouth Safety and Security officers occupied an empty zone marked by plastic barriers, according to Alberghini. With the new precautions, fewer than 10 students managed to enter the collapse zone.
Despite this relative success, in 2018, the Town initially denied Dartmouth the outdoor events permit required to hold the bonfire on “a number of grounds” — including “an inability to secure insurance for the event, an observed increased risk to first responders and an observed increase in tensions between Town officials and students because of some of the student behavior,” Van Citters said. That summer, the Provost commissioned a working group on the bonfire, which was “charged with looking at the bonfire structure and looking at how Dartmouth Night was organized,” Van Citters said.
The working group then revised the bonfire’s structural design to improve the safety of students, first responders and security officers, Van Citters said. Since the previous structure had fallen in unpredictable ways, Van Citters built hundreds of scale models — using high-speed photography “to perturb the models” and cause them to fall “in different ways as if different sticks had burned, different timbers had burned in different ways,” he said. Van Citters also recreated previous falls from old bonfire photos to understand “how it fell down in previous years.”
With this new information, Van Citters then redesigned the structure so that “it could only fall inward” and “always imploded,” he said.
According to Alberghini, the working group brought a new concept to the Town in 2018: Homecoming would be a “more social” and “more controlled environment” that was “safer” for students.
The working group’s structural and organizational changes — which included the new bonfire design — convinced Hanover to issue the required outdoor event permit in 2018. Barriers around the bonfire were also adjusted. The first was an eight-foot chain link fence that wrapped around the fire, lined with safety and security personnel.
Farther away from the fire, the second layer consisted of two six-foot fences marking a path around the bonfire where freshmen would walk. Unlike prior years — when the freshmen would run 100 plus their graduation year’s worth of laps — students now walked once around the bonfire before exiting, according to Alberghini.
The third layer of fencing separated the freshmen and observers. The Department of Safety and Security also put up lights around the Green to give better visibility, whereas the event had previously happened in complete darkness, according to Montás.
The build process also saw updated leadership. Prior to 2018, “student life used to run the process of the bonfire build,” according to Alberghini. Students passed down a manual, which detailed instructions on how to build and run the bonfire. After 2018, however, Alberghini said “it was more the administration leading the construction of the bonfire.”
Courtesy of Jim Alberghini
A New Era of Safety
Since the 2018 changes, no one has breached the collapsing zone of the fire, and the number of injuries and arrests on Homecoming Night, in general, have drastically decreased, according to Montás.
“[You] look at the students and they seem … wondrous,” Albergini said. “… It’s great that we were able to work with the Town to keep this tradition — make it safe enough that the Town would allow it so that the students [can] enjoy it.”
Montás added that he anticipates another safe celebration.
“[We] look forward to another safe bonfire [and] encourage our community to enjoy the bonfire and be safe and practice common sense,” Montás said.
