Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
From the Profile Lake, the Pemigewasset River flows southward, deep
down in the narrow Franconia Notch, the stream descending over five
hundred feet in five miles. Here is the "Flume," and beyond it the
gorge widens, giving a view which Thomas Starr King has described as
"a perpetual refreshment," for it extends far away southward over the
broadening intervale, one of the fairest scenes in nature, stretching
many miles to and beyond Plymouth. The "Flume" is made by a brilliant
little tributary brook dashing along the bottom of a fissure for
several hundred feet, bordered by high walls rising sixty to seventy
feet above the torrent and only a few feet apart. The water rushes
towards the Pemigewasset between these smooth granite walls, and the
awe-struck visitor walks through in startled admiration. The "Pool" is
beyond, a deep, dark basin, into which the Pemigewasset falls,
surrounded by a high rocky enclosure, making an abyss over a hundred
feet across and one hundred and fifty feet deep. There is also another
pellucid green basin below, into which the river tumbles by a pretty
white cascade, this being a huge pothole originally ground out by the
action of boulders whirled around in it by the current. A galaxy of
peaks environ this pleasant glen in the Franconia and Pemigewasset
ranges, the highest of them, Mount Lincoln, rising fifty-one hundred
feet, and having Mount Liberty, a lower peak, to the southward.
TO PLYMOUTH AND BEYOND.
Emerging from the Franconia Notch, the broadened valley reaches the
attractive village of North Woodstock, another cluster of hotels and
summer boarding-houses in an attractive location. The Pemigewasset
receives its eastern branch, passes other villages, is swollen by the
brisk torrent of the Mad River, and then, amid lower mountains and
broader vales, but still with the most delicious views, comes to the
typical White Mountain outpost town of Plymouth, at the confluence of
the Pemigewasset and Baker Rivers, the latter coming in from the
northwest. Captain Baker with a company of Massachusetts rangers,
early in the eighteenth century, attacked an Indian village here, and
his name was given the tributary stream. The Puritan colonists,
however, did not actually settle Plymouth until 1764. The town is full
of summer cottages and boarding-houses, is noted for its manufacture
of fine buckskin gloves, and has as its chief relic the little old
building, then the court-house, in which Daniel Webster made his first
speech to a jury. It was here that Nathaniel Hawthorne suddenly died
in May, 1864. He was travelling with his intimate friend, ex-President
of the United States Franklin Pierce, and stopping overnight at a
hotel, was found dead in his room next morning, having passed quietly
away while sleeping. Far away beyond Plymouth the bright Pemigewasset
flows, receiving the outlets of the Waukawan Lake, and of the
beautiful and island-dotted Squam Lake, its enclosing hills being most
superb sites for summer villas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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