THAT OZYMANDIAN FEELING

Granite State Icon Crumbles (Jennifer Skalka, 5/04/03, Concord Monitor)

White settlers first discovered the Old Man about 200 years ago. New Hampshire lore tells the tale of two Franconia road crew workers, Francis Whitcomb and Luke Brooks, who were the first people to make a record of the Old Man. In the 1820s, innkeepers at Crawford Notch began spreading word of the Old Man to hikers and a sign was erected next to Profile Lake showing travelers how to glimpse the Old Man, who from the wrong angle looked like the granite rocks that surrounded him.

Word of the Old Man spread quickly. In 1832, author Nathaniel Hawthorne visited. He later published a short story called The Great Stone Face. An 1857 guidebook told visitors from New York how to find the Old Man: Take a train for Boston and another to Weirs Beach. Take a steamship partly across Lake Winnipesaukee. From the northern shore, take a stagecoach to Franconia.

By the mid 1800s, the Old Man's fame grew through reports of adventurers and through works of art, and tourism in the White Mountains started to boom, according to historian Peter Wallner.

?For the development of New Hampshire, it was definitely an important symbol,? Wallner said.

The Old Man was showing his age by the early 1900s; even then, his brow was his primary weakness. In 1916, New Hampshire Gov. Rolland Spaulding offered state money to keep the Old Man in his perch.

And then, of course, by 1960, the Old Man's care became a state priority and a Nielsen family tradition. The Old Man's myth was mighty, as New Hampshire lawyer, orator and senator Daniel Webster once proclaimed.

?Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades,? Webster said. ?Shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers, a monster watch; even the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Franconia Mountains God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that here in New Hampshire, He makes men.?

Yesterday, men, women and children made a pilgrimage to the Notch, to gaze up at the Old Man's resting place. They took photographs and drew pictures.

?It's sad. It could make a grown man cry,? said George Bald, commissioner of the state Department of Resources and Economic Development. ?It's just a terrible situation.?

Reached by phone yesterday, former Republican governor Hugh Gregg was shocked to learn the news. He said the state had been so careful through the years to watch over the Old Man. He couldn't understand why he'd fallen so suddenly.

?It's a unique form of nature that God gave to us,? Gregg said. ?Those things out at (Mount) Rushmore were made by man, but this was made by God.?

Here Hawthorne:

One afternoon, when the sun was going down, a mother and her little boy sat at the door of their cottage, talking about the Great Stone Face. They had but to lift their eyes, and there it was plainly to be seen, though miles away, with the sunshine brightening all its features.

And what was the Great Stone Face?

Embosomed amongst a family of lofty mountains, there was a valley so spacious that it contained many thousand inhabitants. Some of these good people dwelt in log-huts, with the black forest all around them, on the steep and difficult hill-sides. Others had their homes in comfortable farm-houses, and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle slopes or level surfaces of the valley. Others, again, were congregated into populous villages, where some wild, highland rivulet, tumbling down from its birthplace in the upper mountain region, had been caught and tamed by human cunning, and compelled to turn the machinery of cotton-factories. The inhabitants of this valley, in short, were numerous, and of many modes of life. But all of them, grown people and children, had a kind of familiarity with the Great Stone Face, although some possessed the gift of distinguishing this grand natural phenomenon more perfectly than many of their neighbors.

The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact, did they appear; until, as it grew dim in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains clustering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed positively to be alive.

It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or womanhood with the Great Stone Face before their eyes, for all the features were noble, and the expression was at once grand and sweet, as if it were the glow of a vast, warm heart, that embraced all mankind in its affections, and had room for more. It was an education only to look at it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2003 10:16 AM