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27917 text 03.qxp 7/9/08 1:25 PM Page 157 1 10 2 The Next Big Thing T he cumulative discontent with the Hudson Valley route—its overexposure, the rising crime, the large number of “would­be ultra­genteels”—meant that some began to look for new fields for tourism, for places that could deliver the promise of un­ spoiled, yet readily accessible nature. One way to measure this development is to look at the tourist guide­ books. Gideon Minor Davison’s Fashionable Tour, for example, was the first description of that pioneering tourist circuit. In the original 1822 edition, it described a route from New York up to Saratoga, out to Niagara, and back via Quebec to Burlington, Vermont, and through western Massachusetts to Boston.1 The 1825 edition’s route was virtually identical, although among its additions was a description of Mt. Holyoke, near Northampton, Mass­ achusetts, where a new mountain house had been built. This and other de­ scriptions neither expanded the route of the Fashionable Tour nor changed its basic itinerary. But in the 1828 edition Davison substantially added to the itinerary: he devoted several pages to the White Mountains of New Hamp­ shire, focusing particularly on the area around Franconia Notch. Theodore Dwight, too, added a White Mountain section to his 1828 guidebook, and he devoted even more pages to it than Davison. He also included not only a twenty­one page essay on them in his 1829 Sketches of Scenery and Manners but also a four­page appendix.2 The White Mountains are a spectacularly scenic mountain range in northern New Hampshire. As they are the home of Mount Washington, the highest mountain on the eastern seaboard, they were well known, at 157 27917 text 03.qxp 7/9/08 1:25 PM Page 158 158 Chapter Ten least as unusual landscape features, in early America. And although there had been some literary attention paid to them in travel literature prior to the mid­1820s, relatively little had been written about visiting them. Get­ ting to them was a problem: the roads were good enough for trade, but it was a long and difficult journey from the main routes of travel. As the highest peak, Mount Washington had a built­in attraction. It had first been climbed by an European in the mid–seventeenth century, and a few others came there to repeat that feat over the years. Those travelers who came to the mountain in the first years of the nineteenth century stayed at an inn built by Ethan Crawford located in the Franconia Notch, a dramatic site where the White Mountains are cleft by a narrow valley. There, sheer mountainsides rise high above the fast­running Saco River. With the light but steady traffic of climbers, Crawford hoped to increase his patronage. In the summer of 1818, he cut the first trail to the top of Mount Washington, a trail that began, naturally enough, at his inn. He then began to lead small groups of adventurers to the mountain’s summit. More attention was focused on the mountains when Timothy Dwight praised them in his 1821 Travels in New York and New England, but their re­ moteness meant that they were not widely thought of as a tourist destina­ tion before 1826.3 That year, a catastrophe put the White Mountains on the tourist map. An intense summer drought dried out the lands on either side of the Fran­ conia Notch homestead of the Willey family. Sudden heavy midsummer rains loosened the soil high above their home, and late one night a land­ slide roared down the mountain. The family, hearing this and realizing their fate, fled the home. Had they stayed in place, though, they would have survived: the building itself was spared because it stood on an out­ cropping that parted the flood. The landslide killed the parents, their five children, and two hired hands.4 The Willey disaster and the wide publicity it gained caused a relative flood of tourists to descend on the White Mountains. Thomas Cole, for example, would come in 1827 through the advice of a patron, Daniel Wadsworth. And although he would not paint the mountains for a num­ ber of years, he would write after an 1828 visit that the area was suffused with a “wild grandeur.” The spectacular view was made especially poignant in his mind by the Willey family home, a “little patch of green in the gloomy...

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