He’s a symbol of the state of New Hampshire. Almost all of us know how he fell, but how was the Old Man created? It's been 22 years since the fall of the Old Man of the Mountain, and we’re revisiting a few stories of where he came from in the first place.
Geology
Brian Fowler, president of the Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund and a structural geologist, says the Old Man’s creation story is a pretty simple one: He was always, slowly, falling apart.
“A lot of people would say, ‘Oh, it can't possibly be created by Mother Nature.’ But it was,” Fowler said.
Pieces of the rock face fell from the wall in just the right way and at just the right time. Fowler says unlike man-made profiles, think Mount Rushmore, the Old Man was created by degradation, so his fate was destined to collapse.
Explorers in the area knew that long before Fowler first examined the Old Man in the 1970s.
“Even back in the late 19th century, the then-state geologist, C.T. Jackson, was [telling] people: ‘If you haven't seen it, you should get up there and have a look because it's living on borrowed time,’” Fowler said. “A lot more time than I think he thought at that time it would have, but I drew the same conclusion.”
Since the Old Man fell in 2003, Fowler has received thousands of postcards, emails and photos from people who claim to have found another rock profile that could replace the Old Man. They do occur elsewhere from that same degradation process.
But Fowler said he doesn’t go out searching for them on his own.
“I guess I kind of figure I've seen the best, if you know what I mean,” Fowler said. “But they're all over the place and people love to find them. So, I think there's something in the human blood that is attracted to it.”
History
For years, independent curator Inez McDermott has studied the attraction and historical lore that have led people to the Old Man for centuries. She curated an exhibit at the Museum of the White Mountains for the 20th anniversary of when he fell. Fowler and McDermott are friends.
“You can look at the origin story as the geological scientific origin, which Brian [Fowler] has a good handle on, although a lot of it's still a mystery,” McDermott said. “My understanding of the first white settlers to see the old man was in 1805, and there is still a battle between sort of two camps as to which surveying team saw it first.”
Some believe it was a team from Franconia, others say it was a team from Woodstock who first saw the Old Man.
People from urban areas in the northeast used to take horse-drawn carriage rides around New England, and would make pit stops in the White Mountains. It took a while before the Old Man gained cultural traction, the advent of rail travel helping, but McDermott said he really became a household name when the hotels and resorts started cropping up in the area in the late 1840s and 1850s.
“When people vacationed up there, a lot of times they would stay for three, four, five, six weeks,” McDermott said. “That's when the Old Man starts to become a real tourist attraction.”
A profile so massive and clear, it was described as godly or supernatural by some. The Old Man beckoned landscape painters, writers and poets to the area.
McDermott says the work of 19th century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne further popularized the Old Man. His 1850 short story “The Great Stone Face” prompted many visitors to see the Old Man for themselves and is culturally relevant, managing to clinch a 3.8 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.
In Hawthorne’s version of the story, the Old Man was part of a prophecy. It claims a man who resembles the rock face would eventually be found, and he would be "the greatest and noblest personage of his time."
Hawthorne drew parallels between the Old Man and 19th century lawyer and New Hampshire representative Daniel Webster.
A love story
Griffin Hansen, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Goffstown, reimagined the Old Man’s origin. In Hansen’s short film, “Within the Crystal Hills,” he is an impoverished miner from Franconia Notch who, motivated by love, becomes trapped in the mountains of the notch, transformed into the Old Man.
Hansen came up with the story alongside one of his classmates from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
“She brought in these beautiful, folksy and fairy tale-esque ideas of love and romance and belonging and being something for someone,” Hansen said. "And I brought in these very New Hampshire ideas of being very disciplined, of course the Old Man of the Mountain proper and all of these elements of local history from the ironworks and Saugus to the character being named Carrigain, after the mountaineer and the mountain.”
Hansen says the Old Man’s love story brought his family together. His maternal grandmother is the narrator of “Within the Crystal Hills.” Her family has lived in New Hampshire for generations.
Hansen’s iteration of the Old Man’s origin story was completely from his mind and that of his collaborator, inspired largely by a type of animation style they wanted to try out. He acknowledges there are many other tales of the Old Man out there.
“There's a dozen origin stories,” Hansen said. “The Abenaki have origin stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne has origin stories. A lot of people and authors from the White Mountain area have come up with their own legends, so we wanted to come up with one ourselves.”
There are origins myths attributed to the Abenaki people, but NHPR was unable to confirm those stories with direct Abenaki sources. McDermott and Fowler have done extensive research on it, and have a theory. Since the Old Man was only visible for a few hundred yards at a specific spot and there’s little evidence of human land use in the area from centuries ago, it’s possible he wasn’t seen or documented by Native Americans before the settlers who documented it in the early 1800s.
A living legacy
Whichever story you believe about his creation: a natural geological process, a prophecy from on high, or a love story, the Old Man has an enduring legacy in New Hampshire. He graces highway signs, license plates and rest stop shot glasses. Some Granite Staters have him tattooed. There’s something about the Old Man that has kept him in the cultural zeitgeist for centuries, and Fowler and McDermott said they don’t expect that to go away anytime soon.
