The Old Man of the Mountain

A real landmark that really collapsed in 2003; the viewing plaza restores it

It fell down. On 3 May 2003 the five granite ledges on Cannon Mountain that had made a face when seen from the north came apart and went into Franconia Notch, and New Hampshire lost the thing on its licence plates.

What it had been was an accident of sightline. The ledges stood 1,200 feet above Profile Lake, about 40 feet tall and 25 wide, and they only resolved into a profile from one direction. They were probably assembled by water freezing and thawing in cracks in the granite after the glaciers pulled back 12,000 years ago, in a valley the same ice had cut into a U. The Abenaki call it Stone Face and hold it as a symbol within their culture, as do the Mohawk. The first written record came around 1805, from Francis Whitcomb and Luke Brooks on a Franconia surveying team, and New Hampshire made it the state emblem in 1945.

The argument about what to do afterwards is more interesting than a replica would have been. A task force including the state geologist David Wunsch recommended that nothing be put back on the mountain face, that a Legacy Fund museum be built near Profile Lake, and that the tribute take the form of five large stones arranged to recreate the image from the viewer's own vantage point at the memorial. That last idea is exactly right about what the Old Man always was: not a sculpture but an alignment.

Other proposals went further. The architect Francis Treves designed a 45-foot glass and steel structure for the mountain face with 250 suspended panels, an interior skywalk and a waterfall fed by diverted rainwater, and it won a state award from the American Institute of Architects in 2009. Two bills that year failed in the House. Ground was broken on the first phase of the memorial in June 2010.