The Old Man of the Mountain: New Hampshire's Vanished Symbol
Near Mount Washington Valley, New Hampshire
For nearly two centuries, the granite profile of the Old Man of the Mountain stared out from the cliff face of Cannon Mountain above Franconia Notch. Five ledges of Conway Granite, stacked by glacial accident roughly twelve thousand years ago, formed a profile forty feet tall when viewed from the north: a jutting brow, a sharp nose, a firm chin. From most angles it was just rock. From the right angle, looking up from Profile Lake, it was unmistakably a face.
Two surveyors from Franconia, Luke Brooks and Francis Whitcomb, are credited with bringing it to wider attention in eighteen hundred and five, though the Abenaki people knew it long before that. Nathaniel Hawthorne made it famous in eighteen fifty with his short story "The Great Stone Face," in which the profile is a prophecy: the people of the valley await the birth of a man whose character will match the nobility of the stone countenance above them.
New Hampshire claimed the Old Man completely. It became the official state emblem in nineteen forty-five, appearing on highway signs, license plates, and eventually the state's entry in the national Statehood Quarters program. It was the state's image of itself: stoic, enduring, shaped by forces it did not choose.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, engineers discovered the ledges were slowly pulling apart and began running steel rods and turnbuckles through the granite to hold them together. Every spring the mountain was inspected. Every year it held.
On the morning of May third, two thousand three, a state park worker looked up and saw nothing. Sometime between midnight and two in the morning, the whole formation had slid off the cliff face and collapsed into rubble at the base of the mountain. It happened without a witness, without a sound that anyone heard.
New Hampshire still puts the Old Man on its signs. The image is of something that is gone.
