In 1797, and again in 1803, President Timothy Dwight of 

 Yale College rode on horseback up the Connecticut Valley and 

 through the Crawford Notch. An account of what he saw is 

 given in his "Travels in New York and New England," pub- 

 lished in 1823. Settlement of the country back from the valley 

 towns was at an early stage; the roads were of the worst, the 

 houses few and scattered. Yet the ravages of fire had begun. 



''When we entered upon this farm in 1803," he wrote, "afire 

 which not long before had been kindled in its skirts had spread 

 over an extensive portion of the mountain on the northeast; 

 and consumed all the vegetation, and most of the soil, which 

 was chiefly vegetable mould, in its progress. The whole 

 tract, from the base to the summit, was alternately white 

 and dappled; while the melancholy remains of half -burnt 

 trees, which hung here and there on the sides of the immense 

 steeps, finished the picture of barrenness and death." 



Thomas Starr King refers in his admirable work, "The White 

 Hills; Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry," to the devasta- 

 tion of Mount Crawford by a great fire which, according to 

 "old Mr. Crawford," occurred about 181 5. "The time may well 

 arrive," he writes, "when careful records of these irreparable 

 mischiefs, which destroy in their progress the very vitality 

 of our mountains, and leave nothing but crumbling rocks, the 

 shelter of a strange and spurious vegetation, — nothing but 

 the ruins of nature — shall possess a mournful value." But it 

 was not until a much later day, when the lumbermen began 

 to operate extensively in the pure spruce forests of the upper 

 slopes, that the fire menace reached a point at which public 

 sentiment became sufficiently aroused to demand with in- 

 sistence some efiicient remedy. 



It was the arrival of the era of the railroad which really 

 opened the White Mountains to the public. Through the 

 first half of the nineteenth century their spreading fame drew 

 a slowly increasing number of travelers into the region, in 

 spite of the obstacles presented by indifferent accommoda- 

 tions and lack of transportation facilities. 



In 1 8 19 Abel Crawford opened a footway to Mount Wash- 



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