Member-only story
One of the many places our family visited when I was but a lad was a mountain in NH called ‘The Old Man of the Mountain.’
It is located at a place called Franconia Notch in Cannon Mountain of the White Mountains.
The picture shows why it was called that.
One can easily imagine the head of a man in the rock, gazing to the reader’s left. The face is 40 feet tall and 25 feet wide, 1200 feet above Profile Lake.
I’m not the only one who likes to anthropomorphize.
It has been there since time immemorial but was first mentioned in writing in 1805.
The rock was a symbol of the Mohawk Native Americans.
Different legends surround the edifice, having to do with a lovely Indian maiden and a warrior or chief who may await her return.
The writer Nathanael Hawthorne describes it, or something like it, thusly in his short story “The Great Stone Face”:
“… 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, to precisely resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant… had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice.”
