Presidential Range with Sheep, 1877 Edward Hill Oil on canvas, 12 x 20 inches Private collection
bases of the mountains rest under the shadow of noble and varied forests.” His art awakened other artists to the potential appeal of the “sublime” and “magnificent” White Mountains region. This American wilderness transcended the savagery of nature; it was a wilderness that seemed to many to be close to the original Eden.
The artists and tourists found lodging in farm homes and boarding houses even in the midst of wilderness. Some of the tourists most taken by the wildness of the area were among America’s best-known transcendentalists. They sought the mountains as a way to transcend earthy reality. Margaret Fuller visited the area in 1842 and there saw an eagle “soaring” through the Notch: “It was a glorious sight.” Each new scene awakened wonder for her. “Mountains crowd one sensation on another, till all is excitement, all is surprise, wonder, and enchant- ment.” In 1839, Henry David Thoreau stayed at an inn in West Thornton, a location that seemed, to him, to be totally isolated. He was surprised
that so many had discovered the apparently wild region. “Sometimes we lodged at an inn in the woods, where trout-fishers from distant cit- ies had arrived before us, and where, to our astonishment, the settlers dropped in at night-fall to have a chat and hear the news, though there was but one road, and no other house was visible—as if they had come out of the earth.” Along with the artists increasingly coming to the White Mountains, writers like Fuller and Thoreau along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Francis Parkman, Thomas Starr King, and John Greenleaf Whittier helped to popularize the area.
The reputation of the White Mountains grew, and small inns like the one Thoreau stayed in were replaced by increasingly larger hotels. Wealthy travelers from Boston and New York arrived by train begin- ning in the 1850s, but even the less-well-to-do came on short trips. After the Civil War ended in 1865, an influx of tourists arrived who
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