White Mountains
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for White Mountains. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a mountain chain of New England, regarded as an outliner of the Appalachian range, commences at the head waters of the Aroostook river, in Maine, where its first summit is Mount Katahdin, and extends in a broad plateau, from 1,600 to 1,800 feet high nearly across New Hampshire, where it has 20 bold peaks, with deep narrow gorges, wild valleys, beautiful lakes, lofty cascades and torrents, forming the "Switzerland of America," and a favorite resort of summer tourists. Mount Washington is the highest summit in New England. The other peaks of White Mountains proper are Mount Madison, Mount Clay, Mount Jefferson, Mount Monroe, and Mount Adams. In the Franconia group are Lafayette and Moose Hillock. These mountains furnish the chief sources of the Connecticut, Merrimac, and Androscoggin rivers. The rocks are ancient metamorphic, with naked granite and gneiss. There are five "notches," or passages through the mountains: the White Mountain notch, through which the Saco river passes; the Franconian notch, which permits the passage of the Pemigewasset; the Pinkham notch, and the Grafton and Dixville notches, through which flows the Androscoggin. A carriage road has been constructed to the summit of Mount Washington on the E. side, and a railroad on the W. side, the latter completed in 1869. The White Mountains were first visited by white men in 1642, but no settlements were made in the region till about 1771. Since 1868 the mountains have been explored by the New Hampshire Geological Survey. There is a meteorological station on the summit of Mount Washington.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
. See New Hampshire
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The landscape Collier's described in 1921 is still there, but almost everything around it has been reorganized. The Weeks Act of 1911 led to the creation of the White Mountain National Forest in 1918, which now protects roughly 750,000 acres of what had been heavily logged private timberland, and the Appalachian Trail (completed in 1937) runs the length of the Presidential Range. The "meteorological station on the summit of Mount Washington" was succeeded by the Mount Washington Observatory, founded in 1932, which two years later recorded a surface wind of 231 miles per hour, the world record for over sixty years. One landmark Collier's readers would have known is gone: the Old Man of the Mountain, the rock profile above Franconia Notch, collapsed on 3 May 2003; the 1869 cog railway up Mount Washington, however, still runs.
Written for this edition, 2026.