New Hampshire

Mount Washington is only 6,288 feet high, and it has some of the worst weather on Earth. In April 1934, observers at the summit recorded a wind gust of 231 miles per hour, a world record that stood for more than 60 years. It sits where several storm tracks meet, and its weather can turn dangerous in any month of the year.

None of that kept the visitors away. In the 1800s the White Mountains became one of the first true tourist regions in the country, drawing artists, writers and city families by train. The Mount Washington Cog Railway began carrying passengers up the mountain in 1869, the first railway of its kind in the world. Grand hotels went up in the notches and valleys, with wide porches and hundreds of rooms. The largest of them, the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, opened in 1902, and in 1944 it hosted the conference that set up the postwar international money system.

The Old Man of the Mountain appears in many of these pictures, a granite profile on a cliff in Franconia Notch that looked like a face from the right angle. It became the state's symbol. It fell in 2003, so the photographs are now the only way to see it.

Southern New Hampshire was a different world. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester grew into one of the largest textile mill complexes in the world, its brick buildings stretching along the Merrimack River for more than a mile. Lewis Hine photographed child workers in New Hampshire mills in the early 1900s. On the coast, Portsmouth was a port and shipbuilding town, and in 1905 it gave its name to the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War.

In the mountain pictures, look at the bare hillsides. Logging stripped much of the White Mountains in the late 1800s, and the outcry over it helped lead to the White Mountain National Forest. The thick woods in today's views are mostly regrowth.