Crawford House Carriage Road

Crawford House Carriage Road is a historic 19th-century carriage route in New Hampshire's Crawford Notch, built for guests of the Crawford House hotel. It carried visitors up to the summit of Mount Willard for its celebrated view down the notch. The Crawford House itself, one of the great White Mountains resort hotels, was first built in 1828 by Abel Crawford and his son Ethan Allen Crawford, rebuilt twice after fires in 1854 and 1859, and for decades drew a guest list that included Daniel Webster, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The hotel itself is long gone; the Appalachian Mountain Club's Highland Center now occupies the site. What survives is the old carriage road itself, now maintained by New Hampshire's state parks as a walking trail rather than a drivable route, still climbing to the same Mount Willard overlook that drew 19th-century tourists. It's less a modern scenic drive than a piece of the White Mountains' early tourism history, worth knowing about even though today it's traveled on foot, not by car.

• Crawford Notch, White Mountains
• historic 1828 carriage road
• Mount Willard summit
• Crawford House hotel (1828-1900s)
• guests: Webster, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson
• now a NH state park trail