Mt. Moosilauke (1913) - From the North
". . . I am sitting as I write in a sunny corner of the pasture behind our house. Though it is but the first week in September, we had a frost last night, and the sun is grateful. The potato plants are already brown, the fodder corn is withering, the leaves of the pumpkin vines are drooping round their stems.
This early frost is a great blow to the farmers of our valley, one of their besetting discouragements. The valley stretches southward from where I sit ten miles to the great blue bulk of Moosilauke, which is beautifully framed through our barn door. The valley is walled on the east by three mountains, averaging four thousand feet in height and springing directly up from the farms. Indeed, the pastures eat their green way up the slopes into the timber.
These three great hills have been lumbered in times past, but by the grace of Heaven - it was no fault of the lumbermen - the fire did not follow, nor the destructive landslide. They are once more going back to their dark, billowy green of spruce and hemlock. Across the level meadows at the valley bottom, beyond the elms which fringe the little river, the Ham Branch, rises a parallel wall of much lower hills, velvety with upland farms or timbered with second growth where the white birches gleam in the trailing shadow of a cloud. I am perched high enough in the pasture to see, both north and south, the steady procession of farmhouses, a quarter of a mile apart, along the ribbon of the single road, each set like a gem in its acres of green mowing, its squares of corn, its pastures sloping up past picturesque sugar houses into the shaggy mountain timber. New Hampshire holds few views at once more rugged with frowning mountains and soft and intimate with pastoral charm.
We are but four miles from a well-known village to the north and the fashionable summer hotels. As I look at the neat and prosperous farms nearby, I realize that their prosperity is largely due to this proximity. We are in the summer-boarder zone. To each one of these farms comes from one to three thousand dollars annually (in some cases more) of "city money." But southward, following the white ribbon of the road toward the wild northern shoulders of Moosilauke, as the town and the railroad recede the case becomes quite different. A mile, at most, and we have left the summer-boarder zone. The air of prosperity ceases; we seem first to step back into a more primitive community lingering on, and then into the ruins of a vanished community. We step into the land of abandoned farms, into a half-wild, beautiful, pathetic desolation. . . ."
From "The Abandoned Farm" by Walter Prichard Eaton, pp. 231-239, The Moosilaukee Reader (Vol.1). ©1999.
