Map of the White Mountains and Vicinity From Thomas Starr King’s The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape and Poetry, 1876.
American writers and painters also flocked to see the spectacular landscape. They taught Americans to value, and even treasure, the forested White Mountains. Word spread of deep valleys, high mountains, and broad open intervals hidden deep in the White Mountains. It inspired a romantic response in the many tourists. In 1832, Nathaniel Hawthorne observed that the mountains: “are majestic, and even awful, when contemplated in a proper mood, yet, by their breadth of base and the long ridges which support them, give the idea of immense bulk rather than of towering height. Mount Washington, indeed, looked near to heaven: he was white with snow a mile downward, and had caught the only cloud that was sailing through the atmosphere to veil his head.” The land had become landscape.
Thomas Cole, “A View of the Mountain Pass called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch)’, 1839, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, NH