WHY WE’RE HEREWe’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time.
In New Hampshire, a granite icon that symbolized the state’s grit has not faded from memory.
May 5, 2023FRANCONIA NOTCH, N.H. — In the annals of natural rock formations resembling human faces, New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain was an unrivaled specimen.
Beloved as he was, the Old Man, may he rest in peace, was a pile of rocks — until the wee hours of May 3, 2003, when the five slabs unceremoniously collapsed, victims of the same slow-moving geologic forces that had sculpted the human likeness in the first place.
So why, 20 years later, is the stone face still mourned in New Hampshire like a fallen president, the subject of songs and poems, a Statehouse proclamation and a virtual remembrance event that drew hundreds of viewers on Wednesday?