William Morgan: Journey to the exotic White Mountains

In the autumn of 1907 Bertha made a trip to the White Mountains. While there she posted a picture postcard to her friend Emma Merrill in Raymond, N.H., a town halfway between Concord and Portsmouth. The ubiquitous Detroit Photographic Company labeled its panorama “Presidential Range from Look-Off, White Mountains, N.H.” The colored photo shows a surprisingly flat landscape in the foreground, with a few houses and barns. Some might mistake the view for that of the Dolomites rising above Italy’s Po Valley.

We forget how provincial New Hampshire was a century and a quarter ago and how exotic the White Mountains must have seemed.

I had a girlfriend from Concord once, and her parents took their honeymoon in northern New Hampshire. More recently, while I was renewing my driver’s license in Keene, a farmer in line in front of me, allowed as to how he had never been to Concord.

Did Bertha take any more trips in her lifetime? We have tantalizing little information to form any sort of a picture of her. Yet Find a Grave connects us with Emma J. Merrill, who is buried in New Pine Grove Cemetery, in Raymond. She died in 1954 at 79. Her husband, William, died the same year; their gravestone tells us that he was two years younger than Emma. Bertha’s postcard, which I bought for a dollar in New Bedford, saves the two women from obscurity.

William Morgan is a Providence-based architectural historian, critic and photographer. He is author of numerous books with New England themes, including The Cape Cod Cottage, which is being published by Abbeville Press this winter.