1900 | Kennedy, — Edwin Faxon 109 
Mr. Faxon made his first trip to the White Mountains in 1843 by 
railroad to Portsmouth, N. H., thence on foot with a Boston friend, to 
Abel Crawford’s house in the Notch. A party was made up for the 
summit of Mt. Washington, and with Tom Crawford as guide, he went 
over the path he was to know so well in later years. On arriving at 
the foot of the cone of Mt. Washington, a dense cloud gathered, but 
the two young men kept on to the top in the fog, while the rest of the 
party waited at the foot of Mt. Munroe. It gave him great satisfaction 
in after years to recall the fact that he had been at the summit of the 
mountain when only a stake in the rocks marked the top. 
It was after 1875 that his regular collecting trips to the mountains 
began. In May or June of each year, he would visit the Crawford 
House before the hotel season began, and explore the woods and 
mountains. An account of one day’s work will show his enthusiasm as 
a collector. In the last week of May he started to gather Potentilla 
frigida in flower in its alpine home. Up the steep path of Mt. Clinton, 
he found no difficulties till near the timber line, but there the soft 
snow was so deep he could scarcely wade through it. Emerging from 
the forest, he found the snow either blown off the rocks, or so hard he 
could walk with more freedom. Following the path to the foot of Mt. 
Munroe, he encountered a barrier in a precipitous snow slope, icy- 
frozen, extending from the top of Munroe to the bottom of Oakes' 
Gulf. Not daring to venture on this toboggan slide of two miles or 
more, he climbed the rocky summit of Munroe, and down the other 
side to the little plain by the ice-clad Lakes of the Clouds, and spent 
several hours exploring Bigelow's Lawn. He then returned by the 
same route to the Crawford House before nightfal. For many years, 
he never failed to visit the top of Mt. Washington, and of all the 
naturalists who collected there, he was the most constant and best 
known. His philosophical acquiescence in bad weather was the ad-. 
miration of other less contented spirits, and he often reaped the ad- 
vantage of this in the brilliant days that follow mountain storms. 
With Mr. Pringle, also, he explored Mt. Mansfield, Vt., with its 
wonderful Smugglers’ Notch, and shared with him the pleasure and 
glory of the interesting discoveries made there. 
Mr. Faxon's most important contribution to American botany was 
the study and collecting of North American Sphagna. For several 
years previous to 1890, he had been much interested in the mosses of 
New England, and in 1899 sent his large collection of Sphagna to 
