Hiram Hitchcock

After a successful career as a New York hotelier, Hiram Hitchcock went into semiretirement in the 1860s and ’70s to travel and follow his interest in archaeology. During this period Hiram and Mary Hitchcock lived in the Hitchcock mansion on what is now Tuck Drive, where Dartmouth’s Thayer and Tuck schools are located. Hiram was very active in local government and business and served as a representative to the New Hampshire State Legislature. He was also president of both Dartmouth National and Dartmouth Savings banks, a trustee of Dartmouth College, and a trustee of the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, (now the University of New Hampshire).

Hiram Hitchcock established the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital as a memorial to Hiram's beloved wife Mary. Hiram's friend Carlton Pennington Frost, an 1857 graduate of DMS, was instrumental in convincing Hiram that a hospital would be an appropriate memorial for Mary. Frost and his faculty formed the Dartmouth Hospital Association, set about acquiring land and funding and persuaded his friend Hiram Hitchcock, to underwrite the project. Finished in 1893, the thoroughly modern 36-bed hospital was one of the first in the country built on the pavilion plan and was, from the beginning, intimately associated with the Medical School and its teaching program.

The Hitchcock Hospital was home to important historical "firsts:" the first diagnostic x-ray in 1896 and the first intensive care unit in 1955.

Once the hospital was established, Hiram travelled again but returned to Hanover in 1866 due to ill health. In 1900, he married his cousin Emily, after advising her to give her family home to the town of Hanover for a library. This Emily did "with the prayer that this library may prove a blessing to this community to the remotest generation." As chairman of the new Howe Library Corporation, Hiram accepted Emily's gift of her family home.

Hiram died only months after his marriage to Emily, leaving her his sizable estate. In the following years as a wealthy widow, Emily gave generously to the Mary Hitchcock Hospital, Dartmouth College and the Pine Park Association. Howe Library clearly had a special place in her heart, however, and was made her residuary legatee in the amount of $150,000.