From the time of earliest settlement, coastal New Englanders have felt the pull of New Hampshire’s White Mountains.  At the northern edge of the Appalachian Mountain Range, they are called the White Mountains because even during the brief summer months when the snows finally recede, the gray rocks along their peaks gleam white in the sun.  At first a place of savage hardship and bloody skirmishes between English explorers and the Canadian-based French and their Indian allies, after 1760 when English rights to the land were established by treaty, the White Mountains represented a laboratory for botanical exploration and an opening frontier to New England’s expanding agrarian economy.

To the victims of rapid urbanization at the middle of the nineteenth century, the White Mountains were symbols of the purity of the wilderness.  Ironically, once the railroad established a foothold in the 1840s and 1850s, it was a wilderness made suddenly accessible.  City dwellers from New York, Boston, and Portland thronged. 

By the end of the century, tourism and the lumbering industry collided.  The same trains that brought visitors to wax eloquent about the views allowed for the removal of vast tracts of clear-cut forest.  Efforts to mediate both interests resulted in a federal law enacted in 1911 establishing the White Mountain National Forest.  Today close to 800,000 acres constitute the White Mountain National Forest; federal regulations limit timber harvesting to less than 1 percent of the forest at any time and support the visits of some six million tourists annually.

Mount Chocorua, named after a Pequawket chief-tain who was supposedly killed in a sqirmish with a vengeful English settler at the mountain’s top, is in the southern reaches of the White Mountain range.  This painting is one of at least three of the subject painted by Benjamin Champney, the acknowledged dean of White Mountain painters.  Champney’s memoir, written after fifty years spent summering in North Conway at the foot of the rang, describes the attraction artist felt to the region:

This view from the Intervale can not be surpassed for living, flowing beauty by anything in New England.  It is simply a perfect picture…. This view has been painted many times by artists too of great distinction, but never has the ideal been realized.  Its elusive charm can not be gully grasped.  

Carlisle, Nancy.  Cherished Possessions, A New England Legacy.  Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), 2003.