Old Man of the Mountain collapsed 2003
— — the face the granite kept, then gave back.
Not only on a wall.
“For nearly two centuries five granite ledges on Cannon Mountain lined up, from one angle on the notch road, into the profile of a man's face. The Old Man fell in the early morning of May 3, 2003, after a long rain and a hard freeze. New Hampshire kept the silhouette on its state quarter, its highway signs, and most things worth signing. The mountain still stands. The face is gone.
Old Man of the Mountain collapsed 2003, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Old Man of the Mountain was a rock formation 1,200 feet above Profile Lake on the eastern face of Cannon Mountain, in Franconia Notch. Five granite ledges, shaped by glaciation and frost-wedging, aligned into a forty-foot human profile when viewed from a narrow stretch of what is now Interstate 93. Surveyors first recorded the formation in 1805, and Daniel Webster later wrote that New Hampshire hung out a sign showing the Almighty makes men. It became the official state emblem of New Hampshire in 1945. The notch lies within Franconia Notch State Park.
The profile collapsed sometime between midnight and dawn on May 3, 2003. State park staff arriving that morning found the ledges had slid into the talus below. Engineers had braced the formation with steel cables and turnbuckles beginning in 1916, and the Nielsen family of Plymouth had maintained it for three generations, but freeze-thaw cycles eventually parted the last seam. No one heard it fall. The fragments still sit on the slope. The granite is Conway-type biotite granite, around 200 million years old, common throughout the White Mountains.
The state observes the anniversary of the fall each May. The Old Man's profile remains on the New Hampshire state quarter, issued in 2000, three years before the collapse; on the official state highway sign; and on the centennial coin struck in 2003. A nonprofit, the Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund, maintains the memorial at Profile Lake and runs an annual ceremony. The town of Franconia still calls itself the home of the Old Man, the way a family still names a house after the person who lived there.