To the southward of Bethlehem is the Franconia group, of which Mount
Lafayette is the crowning peak, its pyramidal summit rising fifty-two
hundred and seventy feet. A notch is cut down into the group, and
through this, the Franconia or Profile Notch, another narrow-gauge
railway going up-hill for ten miles in the forest, traverses the
flanks of Lafayette and leads to the Echo Lake and Profile House, the
most extensive hotel in the region. This is in Coös County, the
mountain county of northern New Hampshire, getting its strangely
pronounced name from the Indian word _cooash_, meaning the "pine
woods," with which almost the whole country was then covered. Here
lived the Abenaqui tribe, known as the "swift deer-hunting Coosucks."
At the highest part of the Notch, where its floor broadens
sufficiently for a few acres of smooth surface between the enormous
enclosing mountains, is built the hotel and its attendant cottages,
standing between two long, narrow lakes at the summit of the pass, the
waters flowing out respectively north and south, from the one, Echo
Lake to Gale River and the Ammonoosuc, and from the other, Profile
Lake to the Pemigewasset, seeking the Merrimack. The Pemigewasset
means "the place of the Crooked Pines," and Profile Lake used to be
called the "Old Man's Washbowl." On its western side rises Mount
Cannon, forty-one hundred feet high, on the southeastern face of
which is the "Old Man of the Mountain," the noted Franconia Profile.
The mountain rises abruptly from the edge of the lake, and twelve
hundred feet above the water is this "Great Stone Face," about which
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote so famously. It is a remarkable semblance of
the human countenance, and can be properly seen from only one
position. Move but a short distance either north or south from this
spot, and the profile becomes distorted and is soon obliterated. It is
composed of three distinct ledges of granite projecting from the face
of the mountain, one forming the forehead, another the nose and upper
lip, and a third the chin. These three ledges are in different
vertical lines, the actual length of the profile being forty feet, and
they make an overhanging brow, a powerful and clearly-defined nose,
and a sharp and massive projecting chin, the very mark of complete
decision of character, so that the realism of the profile is almost
startling. The Old Man's severe and somewhat melancholy gaze is
directed towards the southeast over the lake, as if looking earnestly
down the Notch.
The white man's discovery of this profile was made in the early
nineteenth century by two road-makers, mending the highway through the
Notch. Stooping to wash their hands in the lake, just at the right
spot, they casually looked up and saw it, being struck instantly by
the wonderful facial resemblance. "That is Jefferson," said one of
them, Thomas Jefferson then being President of the United States, and
the stern countenance certainly looks like some of his portraits.
There he is, gazing far away, with sturdy, unchanging expression, as
he has done for thousands of years. Thomas Starr King, who has so well
described these mountains, regards the "Great Stone Face" as "a piece
of sculpture older than the Sphinx--an imitation of the human
countenance which is the crown of all beauty, that was pushed out from
the coarse strata of New England, thousands of years before Adam." Yet
a slight change from the proper position for view greatly alters the
profile. Move a few paces northward, and the nose and face are
flattened, only the projecting forehead finally being seen. Go a short
distance to the southward, and the Old Man's decisive countenance
quickly deteriorates into that of a toothless old woman wearing a cap,
and soon the lower portion of the face is so distorted that the human
profile is obliterated. The Cannon Mountain bearing the famous profile
is a majestic ridge named from a spacious granite ledge on its steep
slope, presenting, when observed from a certain position below, the
appearance of a cannon ready for firing. Its summit rises seven
hundred feet above the profile.
From the Profile Lake, the Pemigewasset River flows southward, deep
down in the narrow Franconia Notch, the stream descending over five
hundred feet in five miles. Here is the "Flume," and beyond it the
gorge widens, giving a view which Thomas Starr King has described as
"a perpetual refreshment," for it extends far away southward over the
broadening intervale, one of the fairest scenes in nature, stretching
many miles to and beyond Plymouth. The "Flume" is made by a brilliant
little tributary brook dashing along the bottom of a fissure for
several hundred feet, bordered by high walls rising sixty to seventy
feet above the torrent and only a few feet apart. The water rushes
towards the Pemigewasset between these smooth granite walls, and the
awe-struck visitor walks through in startled admiration. The "Pool" is
beyond, a deep, dark basin, into which the Pemigewasset falls,
surrounded by a high rocky enclosure, making an abyss over a hundred
feet across and one hundred and fifty feet deep. There is also another
pellucid green basin below, into which the river tumbles by a pretty
white cascade, this being a huge pothole originally ground out by the
action of boulders whirled around in it by the current. A galaxy of
peaks environ this pleasant glen in the Franconia and Pemigewasset
ranges, the highest of them, Mount Lincoln, rising fifty-one hundred
feet, and having Mount Liberty, a lower peak, to the southward.