The Old Man of the Mountain

West of here, in Franconia Notch, a stack of granite ledges on Cannon Mountain once formed a human profile so striking that it became the very symbol of New Hampshire. It was called the Old Man of the Mountain, sometimes the Great Stone Face, and it gazed out over Profile Lake from twelve hundred feet up, a natural sculpture about forty feet tall. The Abenaki knew it long before European settlers, and it captured the American imagination.

Nathaniel Hawthorne built a famous short story around it in eighteen fifty called The Great Stone Face, and the profile was often compared to the great New Hampshire statesman Daniel Webster, who is said to have looked up at it and remarked that in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty had hung out a sign to show that there He makes men. New Hampshire made the Old Man its official state emblem in nineteen forty-five and put his profile on the state quarter released in the year two thousand. And then, on the third of May, two thousand three, after standing for thousands of years, the Old Man of the Mountain quietly collapsed.

It was whole on the evening of May second and gone by the morning of May third. The state that had loved him for generations woke up to find its stone face had fallen. Today, viewfinders at a memorial plaza let you stand where he once looked down and see his profile restored in your mind's eye.