Harvey Gibson — The Banker Who Built a Ski Destination

The story of North Conway as a skiing destination is in large part the story of one man's loyalty to his hometown. Harvey Dow Gibson was born in North Conway in eighteen eighty-two and spent his adult career in banking. He eventually became chairman of the board of Manufacturers Trust Company in New York, one of the largest banks in the country.

But his deepest investment was in the place where he grew up. Gibson acquired control of Mount Cranmore in the nineteen thirties and funded significant expansion of its trails and facilities. He hired local mechanic George Morton to build the unusual Skimobile lift.

And he used his European business contacts to identify Hannes Schneider, widely recognized as the greatest ski instructor in the world, as the right person to build Cranmore into a real destination. When Schneider was imprisoned by the Nazis in Austria in nineteen thirty-eight, Gibson did not simply offer sympathy from a distance. He used his diplomatic and financial influence to secure Schneider's release and personally sponsored his immigration to the United States.

It was a remarkable act, at once humanitarian and entrepreneurial. Gibson died in nineteen fifty, but the ski area he built still operates at the center of North Conway's winter economy.