The Old Man of the Mountain, The Face That Fell

Every New Hampshire driver knew the face on the highway signs. Five ledges of Conway granite on the flank of Cannon Mountain in Franconia Notch, stacked forty feet high and twenty-five feet wide, arranged by geological accident into the unmistakable profile of a human face in silhouette. The Old Man of the Mountain had been staring north from twelve hundred feet above Profile Lake since long before any English colonist arrived.

The first written mention of it dates to eighteen oh five, when two surveyors happened to look up through the right angle of trees and saw it. New Hampshire adopted the Old Man as its state emblem in nineteen forty-five, the same year it adopted Live Free or Die as its motto. The profile appeared on license plates, state road signs, and eventually on the back of the New Hampshire statehood quarter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story around it in eighteen fifty, called The Great Stone Face, in which the profile becomes a moral touchstone for a village's aspirations. Daniel Webster, who was from New Hampshire, reportedly said: Men hang out their signs indicative of their trade. Shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe, jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.

The stone was always fragile. By the nineteen twenties, the freeze-thaw cycle had opened cracks in the forehead ledge wide enough to see daylight through. The state legislature appropriated money for repair.

Workers drove steel rods and turnbuckles into the rock and came back each summer to check the hardware, adjust the tension, and fill new cracks. For decades the repairs held. In the early morning hours of May third, two thousand and three, the turnbuckles finally lost the argument.

The Old Man of the Mountain came down quietly, sometime between midnight and two in the morning, when no one was watching. By dawn, the cliff was smooth. The state symbol was a pile of rubble at the foot of Cannon Mountain.

The signs still show the profile. The viewfinders at Profile Lake let you look up and see what was there.