1900s

Thoreau’s Cove, Walden Pond, Concord, Mass

by

The view looking south from the northern shore of Walden Pond, around 1908. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

Walden Pond is one of many glacially-formed kettle ponds scattered throughout the landscape of eastern Massachusetts. Despite its relatively small size, it is notable for being the deepest natural pond or lake in the state, with a maximum depth of 103 feet. However, it is best remembered for having been the subject of Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden. In this book, Thoreau describes the two years, two months, and two days that he spent living in a small cabin near the shore of the pond, from July 1845 to September 1847. His cabin was located about 200 feet behind where this photo was taken, just to the north of this cove, which is now known as Thoreau’s Cove.

Writing in Walden, Thoreau outlined his reasons for living here at Walden Pond, explaining how, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” With this minimalistic approach, he constructed a one-room cabin that measured 10 feet by 15 feet, and had a chimney and fireplace at one end. It cost him a total of $28.12 to construct, mostly using recycled materials, and it was located on land owned by his mentor, fellow Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. He furnished the cabin with only the basic necessities, such as a bed, a table, a desk, and three chairs.

Although Thoreau’s time here at Walden Pond is often portrayed as him living off the land in solitude, it was hardly a wilderness experience for him. The pond is just a mile and a half south of the center of Concord, and the Fitchburg Railroad ran along the western shore of the pond, a quarter mile from Thoreau’s cabin. Far from living in solitude, he frequently entertained visitors at his cabin, and he remarked in his book that he had more visitors during this period than any other time in his life. And, despite conducting an experiment in self-sufficiency, he was not above traveling into town for a home-cooked meal, or occasionally having his mother clean his dirty laundry.

Throughout the book, Thoreau frequently makes observations about the natural environment around the pond, including occasional laments about the changes that humans have made to the landscape. He contrasts the “thick and lofty pine and oak woods” of his younger years with the subsequent deforestation along the shores of the pond, and he criticizes the arrival of the railroad, describing it as a “devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town.” However, despite such intrusions, Thoreau was confident in the unchanging nature of the pond, writing:

Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore.

Although Thoreau was  the only person living along the shores of the pond at the time, he was hardly the only one to understand the value of its natural resources. He often interacted with fishermen on the pond, and in one chapter he also provided a lengthy description of the ice harvesting that occurred here on Walden Pond. At the time, naturally-produced ice was the only way to preserve perishable foods, and Boston merchant Frederic Tudor enjoyed a near monopoly on the trade, sending ships filled with New England ice to destinations as far away as India. Thoreau observed this work, likely from this vantage point here on the shore in front of his cabin, and drew parallels between the methods used for ice harvesting and farming:

In the winter of ’46–7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff. . .

To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. . . .

Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored.

Thoreau then concluded his description of the ice harvest with an observation about how interconnected the world had become, thanks to innovations such as trans-oceanic ice shipments:

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. . . . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

Near the end of the book, Thoreau explained his reasons for leaving Walden Pond in September 1847, citing a need to move on to the next phase of his life. He then described the path that he had followed from his cabin to the shore of the pond, using it as a metaphor for the tendency of humans to fall into conformity and consistency in their behaviors and ways of thinking:

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

The exact route of Thoreau’s well-trod footpath is left to some speculation, but it seems unlikely that it would have led to this particular section of shoreline here in these photos. Despite being the closest part of the pond to his cabin, this spot offers only limited views, and the shallow, muddy water here would have made it a poor choice for bathing or collecting drinking water. In his 2018 book The Guide to Walden Pond, author Robert M. Thorson theorizes that Thoreau’s path ran along the western side of the cove, ending at the sandy beach on the far right side of the scene. From there, Thoreau could have observed the entire pond, and he would not have had to wade through the mud and weeds here at the northern end of the cove.

After Thoreau left Walden Pond, Ralph Waldo Emerson sold the cabin to his gardener, who in turn sold it to farmers who moved it to a different location in Concord. It was used for grain storage before being dismantled in 1868. As a result, the $28 cabin ultimately outlived its famous resident, as Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862 at the age of 44.

Over the next few decades, Thoreau’s assertion about Walden Pond preserving its purity would certainly be put to the test. The cool, clear waters of the pond drew visitors here in increasing numbers during the late 19th century, and in 1866the Fitchburg Railroad opened an amusement park and picnic ground on the western shore of the pond. Known as the Walden Lake Grove Excursion Park, it had its own stop on the railroad, and it remained here until 1902, when it burned down.

The first photo was taken several years later, around 1908. By this point, recreation on the pond had shifted to the eastern side, along present-day Route 126. During the early 20th century that section of shoreline was turned into a large, sandy beach, and in 1917 bathhouses were constructed there to accommodate visitors. Five years later, the Emerson family, along with several other landowners around the pond, donated about 80 acres to the state, and the land became the Walden Pond State Reservation.

Over the next few decades, the number of visitors to Walden Pond would continue to increase. Automobiles made it easier than ever to access the pond, and by 1935 it had nearly half a million visitors over the course of the summer, including about 25,000 on busy weekend days. The result was a struggle between conservation and recreation here at the pond, which culminated in a late 1950s proposal to “improve” much of the land around the pond with amenities such as a new parking lot. However, these plans were ultimately halted by a Superior Court judge who ruled that they violated the stipulations of the 1922 donations.

Today, more than 110 years after the first photo was taken and nearly 175 years after Thoreau moved out of his cabin, Walden Pond remains a popular destination. The parking area fills up quickly on hot summer days, and the shores of the pond are often crowded with beachgoers, swimmers, and anglers, along with the occasional literary tourist making a pilgrimage to the site of Thoreau’s cabin. For the most part, a visit to the pond today is far removed from the experience that Thoreau had here in the 1840s, and as one New York Times writer put it, “there are more selfies than there is self-reliance.”

However, the woods along the shoreline do a remarkably good job at hiding the number of visitors. The second photo was taken on a very busy July morning, yet there is surprisingly little evidence of it in the photo, save for a few swimmers far off in the distance. Overall, the landscape from the northern end of Thoreau’s Cove is not dramatically different from what he would have seen here, and if he saw it today he would likely stand by his claim that “it has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples.”

Mount Washington Hotel, Carroll, New Hampshire (2)

by

The Mount Washington Hotel, with Mount Washington behind it in the distance, around 1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

As discussed in more detail in the previous post, the Mount Washington Hotel was the finest of the many grand hotels that were built in the White Mountains during the Gilded Age of late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was completed in 1902, and could accommodate 600 guests who paid the princely sum of $20 per night to stay here. From here, guests enjoyed expansive views of the White Mountains, including the Presidential Range, which forms a dramatic backdrop here in this scene. The hotel’s namesake mountain, looms in the distance on the right side of the photos, and some of the summit buildings are barely visible, some seven miles away and 4,600 feet higher in elevation.

Today, nearly 120 years after it opened, the Mount Washington Hotel still stands as one of the few surviving grand hotels of its era in New England. It has entertained many prominent guests over the years, and in 1944 it was the site of the Bretton Woods Conference, which was a meeting of delegates of 44 Allied nations to establish postwar international monetary policies. The hotel is now known as the Omni Mount Washington Resort, and in 1986 it was designated as a National Historic Landmark, making it one of only 23 properties in the state to earn this recognition.

Mount Washington Hotel, Carroll, New Hampshire

by

The Mount Washington Hotel, with its namesake mountain behind it in the distance, around 1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

The White Mountains became a popular tourist destination during the second half of the 19th century, and the region featured a number of grand hotels. However, few could match the Mount Washington Hotel, which was built here in the Bretton Woods area of Carroll, New Hampshire between 1900 and 1902. It was owned by Joseph Stickney, a coal tycoon who had been involved in White Mountain hotels since 1881, when he purchased the Mount Pleasant House. Located approximately where these two photos were taken, the Mount Pleasant House started small, but it was subsequently expanded under Stickney’s ownership and became a prosperous hotel.

Around the turn of the century, Stickney decided to build an even larger hotel across the street from the Mount Pleasant House. He hired noted New York architect Charles Alling Gifford, who designed this Spanish Renaissance-style building, as shown in these two photos. It has a Y-shaped footprint, and its most distinctive exterior features are the two large octagonal towers. The hotel was completed in 1902 at a cost of about $2 million, and it formally opened on July 31, with a ball that was attended by dignitaries such as Chester B. Jordan, the governor of New Hampshire.

Upon completion, the hotel had 352 rooms and could accommodate around 600 guests. A night’s stay cost $20, which was a substantial amount of money at the time, and it included the room and three meals. Writing about a month before it opened, the Boston Herald declared it to be “one of the largest and most perfectly appointed resort hotels not only in New England, but in the summer resort world.” The article continued with the following description of the hotel:

It will contain, besides the ordinary accommodations for the comfort of guests, many novel and attractive features. The music room is 115 by 73 feet in size, with a spacious stage at one end to be used for amateur theatricals, and the rotunda, which is 135 by 103 feet, is the largest in any hotel in New England. The octagonal dining room in the northwest wing is 84 by 84 feet, and will seat 500 people. On two sides are spacious galleries, which can be utilized for the orchestra. Every suite has a private bath, and the chambers are all very large.

On the ground floor are the indoor amusements, including billiard rooms, ping-pong tables, golf club quarters, gun room, clubroom, bicycle room, shuffle boards, a large play room for children, and a mammoth swimming pool filled with water from the Ammonoosuc River, and tempered by steam jets to the right warmth. The floor of the pool is tiled, and adjoining are dressing and toilet rooms, with facilities for Turkish baths.

The first photo was taken only a few years after the Mount Washington Hotel opened. It shows the building and grounds from the main road, about a half mile away. In the foreground is the bridge over the Ammonoosuc River and the long driveway to the hotel. In the distance is the hotel’s namesake mountain, Mount Washington, which stands beyond and to the right of the hotel. The summit is about seven miles east of the hotel, and about 4,600 feet higher in elevation. Rising 6,288 feet above sea level, it is the highest mountain in the northeastern United States, and it is flanked by other peaks in the Presidential Range, including Mount Jefferson on the far left and Mount Monroe on the far right.

The Mount Washington Hotel was a popular resort destination throughout the early 20th century, drawing prominent guests such as Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Mary Pickford, and Babe Ruth. However, the most famous gathering here occurred in July 1944, in the midst of World War II, when 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel. Known as the Bretton Woods Conference, this meeting was held in anticipation of the end of the war, in order to establish international monetary policies for the postwar world.

The Bretton Woods Conference delegates included many of the world’s leading economists, including Harry Dexter White, John Maynard Keynes, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., who presided over the conference. Among the agreements reached here were the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, along with policies for currency exchange rates. The conference led to what became known as the Bretton Woods system, which remained the predominant international economic system until the early 1970s.

In the meantime, the mid-20th century was a difficult time for the grand 19th century hotels in the White Mountains. Many succumbed to fire, while others faced a slow, steady decline as the buildings aged and tourist preferences shifted. However, the Mount Washington Hotel managed to avoid the fate of nearly all its contemporaries, and it still stands here nearly 120 years after it opened.

Today, there have been few significant exterior changes to the hotel, and the scene still looks much the same as it did at the turn of the 20th century, although the trees are now much taller and partially hide the building from this spot. Now known as the Omni Mount Washington Resort, it remains one of the premier hotels in the region, and it stands as a rare surviving Gilded Age resort hotel here in New England. Because of its historic significance, particularly with regards to the Bretton Woods Convention, the hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and it was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

Crawford Notch, Carroll, New Hampshire

by

The view looking south toward Crawford Notch from the Crawford House in Carroll, New Hampshire, around 1900. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

As explained in an earlier post that shows the view from the opposite direction, Crawford Notch is an important mountain pass that, for many years, was the only east-west route through the White Mountains. The notch, which was originally barely 20 feet wide, was unknown to European colonists until 1771, when two settlers discovered it while hunting. It soon became a major transportation corridor, beginning with a rough road that was later upgraded for stagecoach travel. By the late 19th century, a railroad also ran through the notch, as shown by the tracks and station building in both photos.

Like most mountain passes, Crawford Notch forms the divide between two major rivers. In the foreground of this scene is Saco Lake, the headwaters of the Saco River. From here, the river runs through the gap in the mountains, which is known as the “gates” of Crawford Notch. The river then flows through a narrow, steep-sided gorge for several miles, and it ultimately flows through Maine and into the Atlantic Ocean a little south of Portland. On the other side of the divide is the Crawford Brook, which rises just behind where these photos were taken and flows into the Ammonoosuc River. The Ammonoosuc River then flows into the Connecticut River, which eventually reaches the ocean in Long Island Sound.

These two photos show perhaps the most dramatic view of Crawford Notch, looking south from right about the point where the two watersheds divide. From here, the relatively broad, flat valley on the north side of the notch narrows to a small opening that is flanked by steep cliffs on either side. Just to the left of the notch is a rock formation known as Elephant Head, and on the right is the eastern slope of Mount Willard. However, the most prominent landscape feature here is Mount Webster, which forms an impressive backdrop to the scene. At 3,911 feet in elevation, its summit rises two thousand feet above the floor of Crawford Notch, and it forms the southern end of the Presidential Range.

Given the amount of traffic that was funneled through Crawford Notch, the area was the site of several hotels and inns in the early 19th century. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Willey House, located about three miles south of here. In 1826, the occupants of the inn were killed in a landslide, after they fled the house in the middle of the night in an effort to escape the falling rocks and mud. Ironically, the building itself was unharmed by the landslide, and the tragic event was subsequently immortalized in paintings and literary works.

Many accounts of the tragedy made it a moral lesson about the untamed power of nature, yet it did little to dissuade visitors to Crawford Notch. If anything, it seemed to have the opposite effect, and by the mid-19th century the area was no longer simply a convenient transportation corridor; it had become a destination in its own right. Among those who benefitted from this was the Crawford family, for whom the notch is named. In 1828, just two years after the landslide, Ethan Allen Crawford built the Notch House here at the gates of Crawford Notch, and his brother Thomas subsequently ran it for many years. From here, the Crawfords offered guided tours to the summit of Mount Washington via the 8.5-mile Crawford Path, which Ethan Allen Crawford and his father Abel had cut in 1819.

The original Notch House was located in the distance of this scene, close to the actual notch. However, in the early 1850s Thomas Crawford began construction on a new hotel just to the north, located where these two photos were taken. He ran into financial difficulties and had to sell the half-finished hotel, but it was completed under new ownership. However, the building was destroyed by a fire in 1859, and was subsequently rebuilt and reopened later in the year. Known as the Crawford House, it became a popular tourist destination throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. It ultimately closed in 1975, and burned two years later.

When the Crawford House opened, there was no rail service through Crawford Notch. However, this changed in 1875, when the Portland & Ogdensburg Railroad opened here. This railroad was subsequently acquired by the Maine Central Railroad in 1888, and in 1891 the new owners built a Queen Anne-style station here at the Crawford House, which is visible in the foreground of both photos. The first photo shows a locomotive at the station, Maine Central No. 101, a 4-4-0 steam locomotive that was built in 1889 and scrapped in 1916.

Today, around 120 years after the first photo was taken, relatively little has changed in this scene. Right behind where the photos were taken, the Crawford House is long gone, and it is now the site of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Highland Center. However, the view south toward the notch looks much the same as it did in 1900, including the historic railroad station, Saco Lake, and the surrounding landscape. Most of the land within Crawford Notch is now part of the Crawford Notch State Park, which was established in 1913, and the surrounding land on the mountains is part of the White Mountain National Forest, which was established in 1918.

Mount Jefferson from Mount Monroe, New Hampshire

by

Mount Jefferson and the northern Presidential Range from near the summit of Mount Monroe, around 1900. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

The first photo here was taken from the same spot, and perhaps even on the same day, as the one in the previous post. However, while that photo shows the summit of Mount Washington from Mount Monroe, this view looks a little further to the west, showing the western side of Mount Washington with Mount Jefferson further in the distance. As was the case with the previous post, I took the 2020 photo without having first seen the 1900 one. I took the photos during a hike along the southern Presidential Range from Crawford Notch to Mount Monroe, and later discovered that several of the photos lined up perfectly with ones that were taken around 1900 by the Detroit Publishing Company. In this particular view, perhaps the most remarkable similarity is that both photos show a Mount Washington Cog Railway train in the exact same location, right in the center of the photo.

The highest mountain visible in this scene is Mount Jefferson, which is a little over three miles away from here. At 5,712 feet, it is the third-highest peak in the northeastern United States, after the nearby Mount Washington and Mount Adams. Along with Mount Madison and Mount Monroe, these comprise the five highest peaks in the region, and they are named in honor of the first five presidents, with the elevation rank corresponding to the order in which they served as president. However, Madison and Monroe are very close in elevation, and subsequent surveys discovered that Monroe is actually slightly higher, despite being named for the fifth president.

Aside from Mount Jefferson, the most visible landscape feature here is Ammonoosuc Ravine, a large glacial cirque in the foreground that forms the western slope of Mount Washington. Further in the distance is Burt Ravine, a somewhat smaller cirque to the northwest of Mount Washington. In between these two ravines is a ridgeline that runs diagonally across this scene. The steep slopes of this ridge, combined with the heavy precipitation here, makes it prone to landslides, and both photos show the scars of large slides here on the southern side of the ridge.

Both photos also show the Mount Washington Cog Railway, which runs along this ridge between Ammonoosuc and Burt Ravines. Completed in 1869, this three-mile railroad was a major engineering feat, with trains rising about 3,500 feet in elevation from the base station to the summit. This was far too steep for conventional trains, so the railway’s founder, Sylvester Marsh, developed a rack-and-pinion system with a gear on the locomotive that engaged a rack in the center of the track. This allowed the gear to pull the train up the mountain, and then safely lower it in a controlled descent on the return trip.

The Mount Washington Cog Railway was the first of its kind in the world, and it today it is the world’s second-steepest railroad. The single steepest part of the route is a trestle known as Jacob’s ladder, with a maximum grade of more than 37%. This trestle is visible in the center of both photos, and coincidentally both photos show a train at the same spot at the base of the trestle. As was the case more than a century ago, the trains still climb and descend with the locomotive always on the downhill side of the train and a single passenger coach facing uphill. The only difference is the type of locomotive; for most of the railroad’s history it operated steam locomotives, but it now primarily uses biodiesel locomotives, which are more environmentally friendly and less expensive to run.

Overall, the type of locomotive on the trestle is essentially the only difference between these two photos. Although the summit of Mount Washington has been heavily developed with over the years with many buildings and other structures, the rest of the Presidential Range has remained largely unchanged, with few signs of human activity aside from hiking trails. Most of the range, along with much of the surrounding land, is now protected as part of the White Mountain National Forest, which was established in 1918 and has grown to over 750,000 acres of land in New Hampshire and Maine.

Mount Washington from Mount Monroe, New Hampshire

by

The summit of Mount Washington, seen looking north from Mount Monroe in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, around 1900. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The view in 2020:

Rising 6,288 feet above sea level, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the northeastern United States. It stands at the center of the Presidential Range, a north-south oriented mountain range that forms a massive ridgeline of bare rocks and alpine vegetation. The range is infamous for its harsh and unpredictable weather, particularly at the summit of Mount Washington, which for many years held the world record for fastest surface wind speed ever recorded, at 231 miles per hour. Hypothermia is a year-round threat to hikers, and although there is no permanent ice cap, pockets of snow can linger well into the summer, as shown in the 2020 photo, which was taken on June 18.

Aside from Mount Washington, most of the other peaks in the range are also named for presidents. The five highest peaks are named after the first five presidents, in order of elevation, so that Mount Adams is the second-highest and Jefferson the third-highest. However, Mount Monroe, where these photos were taken from, is actually the fourth-highest, but it was named for the fifth president because of a surveying error. Monroe is the southernmost of these five major peaks; to the south are several lower peaks in the Presidential Range, including Mount Eisenhower and Mount Pierce.

Mount Washington’s high elevation and inhospitable climate have long attracted visitors to the summit. The first recorded ascent occurred in 1642, when Darby Field climbed the mountain accompanied by two Native American guides. Governor John Winthrop recorded the event in his diary, referring to the mountain as “the white hill,” since the mountain’s eventual namesake would not be born for another 90 years. Field’s exact route is uncertain, but he evidently approached it from the south, as Winthrop mentions two ponds along the way, which were likely the Lakes of the Clouds shown here in this scene. Aside from helping determine Field’s route, the mention of the lakes also helps to verify his ascent, since he would not have known about them unless he actually climbed at least this far.

The mountain was only occasionally climbed during the rest of the 17th and 18th centuries, but this began to change in the early 19th century. In 1819, local residents Abel and Ethan Allen Crawford cut an 8.5-mile path from Crawford Notch to the summit of Mount Washington, following the ridgeline of the southern Presidential Range. The trail passed through this scene just to the East of the summit of Mount Monroe, and most of it is still in use today as part of the Appalachian Trail, making it the oldest continuously-maintained hiking trail in the country. Ethan Allen Crawford built a cabin, and later a hotel, at the base of the trail, and he also acted as a guide for hiking groups setting out from Crawford Notch. The Crawford family later improved the trail for use as a bridle path, and by the 1840s visitors could ride to the top of the mountain on horseback.

The first building at the summit was a small hotel that opened in 1852. It was joined a year later by the rival Tip Top House, which still stands atop the mountain today. At the time, the only ways to get to the top were by foot or by horseback, but this would soon change. The Mount Washington Carriage Road opened in 1861, bringing visitors up the east side of the mountain, and the Mount Washington Cog Railway followed eight years later on the western slopes of the mountain. These two routes helped to spur more development, and by the time the first photo was taken around 1900 the summit was crowded with buildings, including the Tip Top House, a weather observatory, and the massive Summit House hotel, which could accommodate 150 guests. The summit even had its own daily newspaper, Among the Clouds, which was published during the summer months from 1877 to 1917.

By the late 19th century it was easier than ever to reach the summit, but many visitors chose to test their abilities by hiking up the mountain. However, because of the mountain’s notorious and often unpredictable weather, this sometimes led to tragic consequences for unprepared or unlucky hikers. The first known fatality in the Presidential Range was Frederick Strickland, who began his hike on October 19, 1849, when the mountain was already covered in deep snow. He climbed via the Crawford Notch, and he would have passed through this scene on his way up the mountain. Strickland made it to the top, becoming the first known hiker to do so in winter conditions, but he ultimately succumbed to hypothermia while descending the western side of the mountain. His body was discovered well below the tree line, near where the present-day Jewell Trail crosses Clay Brook.

One of the most famous tragedies on the mountain occurred on June 30, 1900, when William Buckingham Curtis and Alan Ormsbee both died of hypothermia while ascending the mountain. Both men were experienced outdoorsmen, and Curtis was renowned as an athlete and promoter of amateur athletics. As with Frederick Strickland a half century earlier, they hiked up the Crawford Path from Crawford Notch. Their goal was to attend the Appalachian Mountain Club meeting at the summit, but they faced harsh conditions along the way, including dense fog, sleet, and high winds. They climbed to the summit of Pleasant Dome (now Mount Eisenhower), and they were last seen alive soon after by a descending group that warned them of the deteriorating conditions ahead.

The first photo was probably taken within a year or two of Curtis’s and Ormsbee’s deaths, and it shows the section of the mountain where their journey came to an end. It is unclear as to whether they took the Crawford Path to the east of Mount Monroe, or if they took  the loop trail over the summit, but just to the north of Monroe they took shelter in a dense stand of stunted spruce trees. For unknown reasons, they subsequently left this shelter, and Curtis’s body was discovered a short distance beyond the trees, somewhere near the foreground on the far right side of these two photos. Ormsbee managed to continue up the mountain, but he ultimately died just a few hundred feet short of the summit.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, the Appalachian Mountain Club built a small shelter here in the area between Mount Monroe and Mount Washington, near the spot where Curtis died. It was completed in 1901, and was large enough for about six to eight people, yet uncomfortable enough to discourage use for anything other than an emergency situation. However, hikers nonetheless used the shelter for regular camping, and in 1915 it was replaced by the Lakes of the Clouds Hut, which was built a little lower on the slope on the far left side of the scene. Far more than just serving as an emergency shelter, this hit was staffed by the AMC, and provided overnight accommodations along with meals for hikers.

Today, around 120 years after the first photo was taken, Mount Washington remains a popular destination, accessible either by train, by car, or by foot. The Lakes of the Clouds Hut has been expanded several times over the years, and it now has bunk space for 90 hikers. The hut is located at the convergence of several major trails, including the Crawford Path, which still follows essentially the same route that the Crawford family laid out more than two centuries ago. The only significant change to the path is here between Mount Monroe and Mount Washington, where it was rerouted to access the hut, and to eliminate unnecessary switchbacks.

Overall, this scene has changed very little since the first photo was taken, aside from the construction of the hut. The surrounding land is now protected as part of the 750,000-acre White Mountain National Forest, which was established in 1918. The Presidential Range is a particularly important part of this national forest, as it features a number of rare alpine plants, including the Robbins’ cinquefoil, an extremely rare flower that can only be found here on the slopes of Mount Monroe. Because of the fragile nature of many of these plant species, combined with the thousands of people who climb Mount Washington each year, one of the present-day challenges here is balancing conservation with recreation in order to ensure that this view continues to remain unchanged for the next 120 years and beyond.