Emerging from the Franconia Notch, the broadened valley reaches the
attractive village of North Woodstock, another cluster of hotels and
summer boarding-houses in an attractive location. The Pemigewasset
receives its eastern branch, passes other villages, is swollen by the
brisk torrent of the Mad River, and then, amid lower mountains and
broader vales, but still with the most delicious views, comes to the
typical White Mountain outpost town of Plymouth, at the confluence of
the Pemigewasset and Baker Rivers, the latter coming in from the
northwest. Captain Baker with a company of Massachusetts rangers,
early in the eighteenth century, attacked an Indian village here, and
his name was given the tributary stream. The Puritan colonists,
however, did not actually settle Plymouth until 1764. The town is full
of summer cottages and boarding-houses, is noted for its manufacture
of fine buckskin gloves, and has as its chief relic the little old
building, then the court-house, in which Daniel Webster made his first
speech to a jury. It was here that Nathaniel Hawthorne suddenly died
in May, 1864. He was travelling with his intimate friend, ex-President
of the United States Franklin Pierce, and stopping overnight at a
hotel, was found dead in his room next morning, having passed quietly
away while sleeping. Far away beyond Plymouth the bright Pemigewasset
flows, receiving the outlets of the Waukawan Lake, and of the
beautiful and island-dotted Squam Lake, its enclosing hills being most
superb sites for summer villas. This is the "mountain-girdled Squam"
of which Whittier sings, and a giant pine tree is pointed out on its
banks where the poet used to sit and watch the lake by hours, and in
honor of which he wrote the _Wood Giant_, one of his most admirable
poems. The Pemigewasset joins the outlet stream of Lake Winnepesaukee
at Franklin, and they together form the noble Merrimack, which, in its
useful flow to the sea, turns so many New England mill-wheels. The
Pemigewasset and its branches drain the southern slopes of the
Franconia ranges in a vast primeval forest, whose inner solitudes are
rarely explored. Upon its eastern verge, far up on the southwestern
slope of Mount Willey, is Ethan's Pond, said to be the most elevated
source of the Merrimack, twenty-five hundred feet above the sea. Its
most remote source is the Profile Lake, at the head of the
Pemigewasset, over which the "Great Stone Face" mounts guard. Thus
writes Thoreau of the Merrimack:
"At first it comes on, murmuring to itself, by the base of stately and
retired mountains, through moist, primitive woods, whose juices it
receives, where the bear still drinks it and the cabins of settlers
are far between, and there are few to cross its stream; enjoying in
solitude its cascades still unknown to fame; by long ranges of
mountains of Sandwich and of Squam, slumbering like tumuli of Titans,
with the peaks of Moosilauke, the Haystacks and Kearsarge reflected in
its waters; where the maple and the raspberry, those lovers of the
hills, flourish amid temperate dews; flowing long and full of meaning,
but untranslatable as its name, Pemigewasset, by many a pastured
Pelion and Ossa, where unnamed muses haunt, tended by Oreades, Dryads
and Nereids, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Hippocrene:
"'Such water do the gods distil,
And pour down every hill,
For their New England men.
A draught of this will nectar bring,
And I'll not taste the spring
Of Helicon again.'
"Where it meets the sea is Plum Island, its sand ridges scalloping
along the horizon like the sea-serpent, and its distant outline broken
by many a tall ship, leaning, still, against the sky. Standing at its
mouth, looking up its sparkling stream to its source,--a silver
cascade which falls all the way from the White Mountains to the
sea,--and behold a city on each successive plateau, a busy colony of
human beavers around every fall. Not to mention Newburyport and
Haverhill, see Lawrence and Lowell, and Nashua and Manchester and
Concord, gleaming one above the other."