Crawford Notch
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Crawford Notch is the steep and narrow gorge of the Saco River in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, located almost entirely within the town of Hart's Location. Roughly half of that town is contained in Crawford Notch State Park.
From the standpoint of physical geography, the notch is at the upper or northern end of this gorge (constituting the extreme southern end of a panhandle at the southeastern corner of the town of Carroll), where the land descends both to north and south, and ascends both to east and west. However, the steepness of the south-flowing Saco's gorge (in contrast to the leisurely descent of the northward drainage into the watershed of Crawford Brook and eventually the Ammonoosuc River) makes it natural to attach the name to the gorge.
The gorge (like Hart's Location) is bisected by U.S. Highway 302 and the Saco, which run very similar courses.
The notch was known to European settlers well enough by 1772 for the boundaries of Hart's Grant to reflect its shape. It was named for Abel Crawford, an explorer, trail-builder and hostelier in the early 19th century. The path and eventual railroad through Crawford Notch opened a new route through the White Mountains for settlers of the Lancaster area (to the northwest) to reach Conway on the way to the trading ports on the coast.
The most mentioned historic event of the notch is the 1826 Willey's Slide, a rock-slide that killed the entire Samuel Willey family in the prepared shelter they had fled to in anticipation of just such an event, but spared completely the house that they had feared such a slide would hit.
In the Carroll portion of the notch, the Appalachian Mountain Club has built and operates the Highland Center Lodge and Conference Center, and has renovated the Victorian-era Crawford Notch train depot as a bookstore. The depot remains a stop on the scenic "Notch Train" railroad, operated seasonally from North Conway.
Points of interest
- Grave of Samuel Bemis, first photographer of the American landscape
See also
- Crawford Notch State Park
- Nash & Sawyer Location, New Hampshire
- , The Crawford Family
External links
Reference
Julyan, Robert and Mary (1993). Place Names of the White Mountains (revised ed.). Hanover: University Press of New England. ISBN 0-87451-638-2.
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