One of the first art objects to be given to Dartmouth College was the Daniel Henchman silver monteith, which the Royal Governor presented to the College's founder and first president, Eleazar Wheelock, in 1773 in honor of Dartmouth's first commencement ceremony of 1771. The silver collection later grew dramatically, primarily through the generosity of Frank L. Harrington, Class of 1924, who from the late 1960s through his death in 1988 donated over seventy-five pieces of colonial New England silver. Because of its carefully defined focus, the Harrington collection is unusually comprehensive in its representation of New England's finest silversmiths— John Coney, Jacob Hurd, and Paul Revere among them—and in its reflection of the evolution of forms and styles indigenous to the region.
