The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery / Tourist's Edition

by Samuel Adams Drake

From this historical picture of Bethlehem in the past, we turn to the Bethlehem of to-day. It is turning from the post-rider to the locomotive. Not a single feature is recognizable except the splendid prospect of the White Mountains, and the magnificent collection of other mountains, which call forth the same admiration to-day. Fortunate geographical position, salubrity, fine scenery—these, and these alone, are the legitimate cause of what may be termed the rise and progress of Bethlehem. All that the original settlers seem to have accomplished is to clear away the forests which intercepted, and to make the road conducting to the view.

It is the position of Bethlehem with respect to the recognized points or objects of interest that gives to it a certain strategic advantage. For example, it is admirably situated for excursions north, south, east, or west. It is ten miles to the Profile, twelve to the Fabyan, seventeen to the Crawford, fifteen to the Waumbek, and eighteen to the base of Mount Washington. One can breakfast at Bethlehem, dine on Mount Washington, and be back for tea; and he can repeat the experience with respect to the other points named as often as inclination may prompt. Moreover, the great elevation exempts Bethlehem from the malaria and heat of the valleys. The air is dry, pure, and invigorating, rendering it the paradise of those invalids who suffer from periodical attacks of hay-fever. Lastly, it is new, or comparatively new, and possesses the charm of novelty—not the least consideration to the thousands who are in pursuit of that and that only.

Bethlehem Street is the legitimate successor of the old road. This is a name sui generis which seems hardly appropriate here, although it is so commonly applied to the principal thoroughfares of our inland New England villages. It has a spick-and-span look, as if sprung up like a bed of mushrooms in a night. And so, in fact, it has; for Bethlehem as a summer resort dates only a few years back its sudden rise from comparative obscurity into the full blaze of popular fame and favor. The guide-book of fifteen years ago speaks of the one small but comfortable hotel, kept by the Hon. J. G. Sinclair. In fact, very little account was made of it by travellers, except to remark the magnificent view of the White Mountains on the east, or of the Franconia Mountains on the south, as they passed over the then prescribed tour from North Conway to Plymouth, or vice versa.

But this newness, which you at first resent, besides introducing here and there some few attempts at architectural adornment, contrasts very agreeably with the ill-built, rambling, and slip-shod appearance of the older village-centres. They are invariably most picturesque from a distance. But here there is an evident effort to render the place itself attractive by making it beautiful. Good taste generally prevails. I suspect, however, that the era of good taste, beginning with the incoming of a more refined and intelligent class of travellers, communicated its spirit to two or three enterprising and sagacious men,[37] who saw in what Nature had done an incentive for their own efforts. We walk here in a broad, well-built thoroughfare, skirted on both sides with hotels, boarding-houses, and modern cottages, in which three or four thousand sojourners annually take refuge. All this has grown from the “one small hotel” of a dozen years ago. Shade-trees and grass-plots beautify the way-side. An immense horizon is visible from these houses, and even the hottest summer days are rendered endurable by the light airs produced and set in motion by the oppressive heats of the valley. The sultriest season is, therefore, no bar to out-of-door exercise for persons of average health, rendering walks, rambles, or drives subject only to the will or caprice of the pleasure-seeker. But in the evening all these houses are emptied of their occupants. The whole village is out-of-doors, enjoying the coolness or the panorama with all the zest unconstrained gratification always brings. The multitudes of well-dressed promenaders surprise every new-comer, who immediately thinks of Saratoga or Newport, and their social characteristics. Bethlehem, he thinks, must be the ideal of those who would carry city or, at least, suburban life among the mountains; who do not care a fig for solitude, but prefer to find their pleasures still connected with their home life. They are seeing life and seeing nature at the same time.

Sauntering along the street from the Sinclair House, a strikingly large and beautiful prospect opens as we come to the Belleview. Here the road, making its exit from the village, descends to the Ammonoosuc. The valley broadens and deepens, exposing to view all the town of Littleton, picturesquely scattered about the distant hill-sides. Its white houses resemble a bank of daisies. The hills take an easy attitude of rest. Six hundred feet below us the bottom of the valley exhibits its rich savannas, interspersed with cottages and groves. Above its deep hollow the Green Mountains glimmer in the far west. “Ah!” you say, “we will stop here.”

Let us now again, leaving the Sinclair House behind, ascend the road to the Profile. It is not so much travelled as it was before the locomotive, in his coat-of-mail, sounded his loud trumpet at the gates of Franconia. A mile takes us to the brow of the hill. We hardly know which way to look first. Two noble and comprehensive views present themselves. To the left Mount Agassiz rears his commanding peak. In front of us, across a valley, is the great, deeply-cloven Franconia Notch. Lafayette is superb here. Now the large, compact mass of Moosehillock looms on the extreme right, together with all those striking objects lately studied or observed from the village of Franconia, which so quietly reposes beneath us. But this landscape properly belongs to the environs of Bethlehem, and never is it so incomparably grand as when the summits are fitfully revealed, battling fiercely with storm-clouds. Every phase of the conflict is watched with eager attention. Seeing all this passion above, it calls up a smile to look down at the unbroken and unconscious tranquillity of the valley.

Facing now in the direction of Bethlehem, the eye roves over the broad basin of the Ammonoosuc for many miles up and down. The hills of Littleton, Whitefield, Dalton, Carroll, and Jefferson bend away from the opposite side; and over the last the toothed Percy Peaks[38] rise blue and clear at the point where the waters of the Connecticut and the Androscoggin, approaching each other, conduct the Grand Trunk Railway out of the mountains. The west is packed with the high summits of the Green Mountain chain. The great White Mountains are concealed, as yet, by the swell of the mountain down whose side the road conducts to the village. “This,” you exclaim, “this is the spot where we will pitch our tents!” But there is no public-house here, and we are reluctantly forced to descend. In proportion as we go down, this seemingly limitless panorama suffers a partial eclipse. The landscape changes from the high-wrought epic to the grand pastoral, if such a distinction may be applied to differing forms of mountain scenery. This approach is, without doubt, the most striking introduction to Bethlehem. It is curiously instructive, too, as regards the relative merits of successive elevations, each higher than the other, as proper view-points.

A third ramble is altogether indispensable before we can say that we know Bethlehem of the Hills. The direction is now to the east, by the road to the Crawford House, or Fabyan’s, or the Twin. We continue along the high plateau, in the shade of sugar-maples or Lombardy poplars, to the eastern skirt of the village, the houses getting more and more unfrequent, until we come upon the edge of the slope to the Ammonoosuc, where the road to Whitefield, Lancaster, and Jefferson, leaving the main thoroughfare, drops quietly down into Bethlehem Hollow. No envious hill now obstructs the truly “magnificent view.” Through the open valley the lordly mountains again inthrall us with the might of an overpowering majesty.

This locality has taken the name of the great hotel erected here by Isaac Cruft, whose hand is visible everywhere in Bethlehem. The Maplewood, as it is called, easily maintains at its own end the prestige of Bethlehem for rapid growth. When I first visited the place, in 1875, I found a modest roadside hostelry accommodating sixty guests; five years later a mammoth structure, in which six hundred could be accommodated, had risen, like Aladdin’s palace, on the same spot. Instead of our little musical entertainment, our mock-trial, our quiet rubber of whist, of an evening, there were readings, lectures, balls, masquerades, theatricals, musicales, for every day of the week.