The Boys of Beaver Meadow: A Homosexual Community at 1920s Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is located in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the banks of the Connecticut River. Just across the river in the state of Vermont is the town of Norwich. If you follow the road heading northwest out of Norwich for about five and a half miles, you will arrive in West Norwich, the present day site of what, in earlier years, was a hamlet called Beaver Meadow. The road that takes you there is called Beaver Meadow Road. It was there in the early to mid-1920s that an all-male group of Dartmouth students and recent graduates stayed in a house where, free from the regulatory eyes of their faculty, they had parties, stayed up late, drank alcohol, and had sex. With each other.

This essay explores the significance of these students' choices for our understandings of the history of homosexuality in the United States. The story of the boys of Beaver Meadow stands in contrast to the historical narrative with which we've become familiar: homosexuality emerges in urban settings. While it is not particularly surprising that homosexual sex occurred at an all-male college in the 1920s, it is certainly noteworthy that homosexually-inclined Dartmouth students (for lack of a better term) created a community of sorts for themselves in rural Vermont. When these students did eventually return to their hometowns, a number of them ended up marrying women. The boys of Beaver Meadow tell us that homosexuality was not seen as incompatible with a more rural existence. Indeed, just as much fun could be had in the country as in the city, and, even more importantly for middle-class college students, more anonymously at that. Returning to the city might well mean returning to the family and friends who knew them; staying in the country meant prolonging a different sort of life.

The story is also interesting for what it can tell us not just about the space of rural New England, but also about the homosocial space in which the incidents evolved. Not only were the young men students at rugged and outdoorsy all-male Dartmouth, the majority of them were also members of the Epsilon Kappa Phi fraternity as well as frequent performers in Dartmouth's theatre program, regularly taking the women's parts in plays. The combination of these three elements—Dartmouth College, fraternity brotherhood, and women's parts in school plays, a combination virtually unimaginable today—has much to tell us about conceptions of masculinity in the 1920s. They help us to understand the ways that masculinity might be envisioned differently in a single-sex environment in comparison to that of a coeducational school. Examining these issues together, this essay explores the ways that different kinds of space—homosocial and rural—contributed to the growth of this homosexual community, raising questions about standard accounts of the emergence of a homosexual identity.

First, however, the story of what happened. As in much of the historiography of homosexuality, especially from and prior to the early twentieth century, most of my evidence comes not from the participants themselves but from those who were charged with regulating, and in this case, punishing them: Dartmouth College authorities. I have found no account of the incidents written by any of the student participants, though their voices do occasionally emerge when they have spoken to the authorities involved. Because of this, and because of the way that Dartmouth officials discussed the case—usually in the most oblique of terms—my understanding of what happened remains partial, at best. That said, I am able to piece together a rough outline of what transpired.

In the early 1920s a group of Dartmouth College students purchased—or perhaps rented, it remains unclear¹—a farmhouse in Beaver Meadow where they spent their free time. Much like the fraternity house to which some of them also belonged, though definitely further away from campus, the house allowed them a place where they could relax, free from the prying eyes of the faculty; considering what it was they were doing with their free time, this was...