Dartmouth Kids Build Obscenely Tall Bonfire On Campus
Dartmouth students may have an abysmal 0-5 football squad this year, but they do have a killer mascot, an amazing beer pong scene, and – most gloriously – a tradition of building obscenely tall bonfires in the center of the Green. The blaze-fest dates back to 1888, after Dartmouth beat Manchester College in baseball. According to The Dartmouth, the bonfire “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.”
Even after the bonfire gained recognition by the school’s administrators, students had trouble finding suitable material to burn. As an article on Dartmouth’s website explains:
Until more recent times, gathering wood for the bonfire was a challenge. As the Dartmouth reported on May 11, 1918, ‘Those too zealous in their efforts laid violent hands upon sundry front door steps and backdoor steps, and likewise fences, not to mention numerous hen houses carried ‘en masse’ to the scene of the celebration.’
It’s somewhat difficult to parse the aforementioned quote, since it was written nearly a century before, but basically it’s saying that some good ‘ol Dartmouth boys – likely drunk on moonshine – tore apart wooden stairs, picketed fences, etc., and festively carried them to the location of the bonfire.
More on the history of the bonfire and a video of 2008′s conflagration, which happened over homecoming weekend last Friday, after the jump.
These days, in line with infantilizing measures taken by higher education administrators across the nation, everything – the combustibles and design of the bonfire structure itself – is tightly regulated. According to The Dartmouth,
The Thayer School of Engineering supplies the current design, which is designed so that it can only collapse inward. Dartmouth also custom orders the wood to fit non-treated, square-cut specifications so that no longer do freshmen builders wander around campus to find scrap wood… For additional safety issues, the freshman builders… are monitored by a professional construction crew…. [and] students must stay outside of the danger area, marked off by white paint on the ground.
Kind of a buzzkill, but at least this prevents kids from being immolated to death, which I think most would agree is a good thing.
The structure
Freshmen running around the bonfire
YouTube footage of the 2008 incarnation
