Dartmouth dangles a dream before youth of one tiny town
Little appears to connect the rural town in one of Vermont's poorest counties with the university 70 miles south in Hanover, N.H.
But Dartmouth owes its existence to Wheelock. In gratitude, Dartmouth continues to honor a 175-year-old commitment made when it was a struggling college desperate to feed its students and pay its bills.
"We had no clue," said George Hill, 20, a Dartmouth junior whose family moved to Wheelock seven years ago from Montana without being aware of the gift.
Area real-estate agents use Dartmouth's gift as a selling point for property in the community, and educators at the area high school, the Lyndon Institute, dream of Wheelock students bright enough to get in.
But only eight children from Wheelock have taken Dartmouth up on the offer. And Dartmouth isn't turning away Wheelock applicants every year. Fewer than 10 Wheelock children graduate from high school every spring.
"A lot of the kids just look at it as an impossibility," Hill said.
He didn't.
"Once I found out I could go tuition-free to Dartmouth, I molded my high school (studies) to Dartmouth," Hill said. He played sports, racked up the extracurricular activities, took advanced-placement courses and kept his nose in his books.
This year alone, his family's choice of homes is saving him $28,965. Total fees are more than $40,000 a year.
"I'm still pinching myself," said Hill's mother, Linda Torrey, a real-estate agent in Lyndonville.
Wheelock is named for Eleazar Wheelock, who in 1769 founded Dartmouth College on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River.
After Eleazar Wheelock died in 1779, his son John, the second president of Dartmouth, was desperate to find a way to keep the school afloat. He asked the Vermont Legislature for help, and Vermont in 1785 granted Dartmouth 23,000 acres in a town it named Wheelock.
Dartmouth over the years collected rents from farmers in the town. The story goes that the offer of free tuition was made in the 1830s, when Dartmouth President Nathan Lord was in Wheelock collecting rent.
No one knows for sure why or under what circumstances Lord is said to have quipped, " 'Anytime anybody wants to go to Dartmouth, send him down,' " said Philip Mathewson, 91, of Lyndonville. His father, Ozias Mathewson, Dartmouth class of 1890, was the first to hold Dartmouth to the pledge.
In 1930, O.D. Mathewson, then the headmaster of the Lyndon Institute, the private high school in Lyndonville that has prepared all eight Wheelock children for Dartmouth, asked college President Ernest Hopkins to put the gift in writing. Hopkins complied.
Despite the vague residency requirements, the scholarship never has been abused. "We have had some families who said, 'We are moving to Wheelock, Vermont, and we want the scholarship.' We've said no," said Virginia Hazen, the college's financial-aid director.
"The looseness of it has always been a question," Hazen said. "We have always taken the stance that until it gets abused, we aren't going to take any action."
Many townspeople seem awed by the offer.
"I think people know it's there, but it's a very hard college to get into," said Town Clerk Michelle Trottier, whose children are in kindergarten and the third grade.
Would she like her children to go to Dartmouth?
"Who wouldn't?" she said.