North Conway — Artists, Skiers, and the Mountain Gateway
Near North Conway, New Hampshire
North Conway sits at the base of the White Mountains in a broad valley carved by the Saco River, and the story of how it became a destination begins not with sport or commerce but with paint. In the summer of eighteen twenty-seven, Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School and the first major movement in American landscape painting, came to the White Mountains and fell under the spell of the raw, dramatic scenery around him. He came back, and others followed.
Over the next fifty years, more than four hundred painters made the journey to North Conway, including Asher Durand, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Jasper Francis Cropsey. Benjamin Champney, a New Hampshire native who had studied in Europe, bought a home in North Conway in eighteen fifty-three and spent the rest of his life here, becoming the dean of the White Mountain School of Art. Collectors on both sides of the Atlantic sought out White Mountain School paintings, and some found their way into prominent collections overseas.
The artists brought curiosity, and the curiosity brought visitors. When the rail line reached North Conway in eighteen seventy-two, the trip from Boston collapsed from days to hours, and hotels filled with summer guests. Then a second wave arrived, one that would remake the town in winter.
In January of nineteen thirty-two, the Boston and Maine Railroad ran the first of its snow trains, special weekend services carrying skiers directly from Boston to the mountains. Five years later the first trail opened at Mount Cranmore. In nineteen thirty-nine, an Austrian ski instructor named Hannes Schneider, freed from imprisonment by the Nazis through diplomatic effort, arrived at Cranmore and brought with him the most influential ski teaching system in the world.
In the summer of nineteen eighty-eight, New Hampshire's first outlet shopping center opened on the old North Conway airport site, adding retail tourism to the economy. Today the Mount Washington Valley draws visitors for four entirely different reasons: art, nature, skiing, and shopping. All of it started with the painters.
