The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by the Curt Teich Co. of Chicago. In the space for the stamp on the divided back they have printed:
'Place One Cent
Stamp Here'.
They also provided some information about The Old Man of the Mountain:
"The Old Man of the Mountain,
Franconia Notch, N. H.
The most perfect natural stone
face in the world, called also
'The Profile', 'The Great Stone
Face' of Hawthorne's story.
Forty feet high. On the south
end of Cannon Mountain.
1,200 feet above the ever-
beautiful Profile Lake".
Sadly, things have moved on since the information on the card was provided, as the modern description below reveals.
Franconia Notch
Franconia Notch (elev. 1,950 feet/590 m) is a major mountain pass through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Dominated by Cannon Mountain to the west and Mount Lafayette to the east, it lies principally within Franconia Notch State Park.
It is traversed by the Franconia Notch Parkway (Interstate 93 and U.S. Route 3). The parkway required a special act of Congress to sidestep design standards for the Interstate highway system, because it is only one lane in each direction.
The Old Man of the Mountain
The Notch was home to the Old Man of the Mountain, a rock formation whose profile is a symbol of the state of New Hampshire, until it collapsed in 2003.
The Old Man of the Mountain, also known as the Great Stone Face or the Profile, was a series of five granite cliff ledges on Cannon Mountain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, United States, that appeared to be the jagged profile of a face when viewed from the north.
Franconia Notch is a valley that was shaped by glaciers. The Old Man formation was probably formed from freezing and thawing of water in cracks of the granite bedrock sometime after the retreat of glaciers some 12,000 years ago.
The formation was first noted in the records of a Franconia surveying team around 1805. Francis Whitcomb and Luke Brooks, part of the surveying team, were the first men to record observing the Old Man.
The Old Man first became famous largely because of statesman Daniel Webster, a New Hampshire native, who once wrote:
"Men hang out their signs indicative
of their respective trades; shoemakers
hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a
monster watch, and the dentist hangs
out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains
of New Hampshire, God Almighty has
hung out a sign to show that there He
makes men."
The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne used the Old Man as inspiration for his short story "The Great Stone Face", published in 1850, in which he described the formation as:
"A work of Nature in her
mood of majestic playfulness".
The profile has been New Hampshire's state emblem since 1945. It was put on the state's license plate, state route signs, and on the back of New Hampshire's Statehood Quarter, which is popularly promoted as the only US coin with a profile on both sides.
Before the collapse, it could be seen from special viewing areas along Interstate 93 in Franconia Notch State Park, approximately 80 miles (130 km) north of the state's capital, Concord.
The Collapse of The Old Man of the Mountain
Freezing and thawing opened fissures in the Old Man's "forehead". By the 1920's, the crack was wide enough to be mended with chains, and in 1957 the state legislature passed a $25,000 appropriation for more elaborate weatherproofing, using 20 tons of fast-drying cement, plastic covering, and steel rods and turnbuckles, plus a concrete gutter to divert runoff from above.
Nevertheless, the formation collapsed between midnight and 2 a.m. on the 3rd. May 2003.
After the Collapse
Dismay over the collapse was so great that people visited to pay tribute, including leaving flowers.
Many New Hampshire citizens considered replacement with a replica. That idea was rejected by an official task force in 2003 headed by former Governor Steve Merrill.
In 2004, the state legislature considered, but did not accept, a proposal to change New Hampshire's state flag to include the profile.
On the first anniversary of the collapse in May 2004, the Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund (OMMLF) began operating coin-operated viewfinders near the base of the cliff. When looking through them up at the cliff of Cannon Mountain one can see a "before" and "after" of how the Old Man of the Mountain used to appear.
Seven years after the collapse, on June 24, 2010, the OMMLF, now the Friends of the Old Man of the Mountain, broke ground for the first phase of the state-sanctioned "Old Man of the Mountain Memorial" on a walkway along Profile Lake below Cannon Cliff.
It consists of a viewing platform with "Steel Profilers", which, when aligned with the Cannon Cliff above, create what the profile looked like up on the cliff overlooking the Franconia Notch.
