Abstract
An examination of the connection of an avalanche on Monday 28th August 1826 in isolated Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, to the rise of tourism in America. It investigates developments that ranged from land speculation to new interpretations of the meaning of nature and landscape. The tragedy that killed innkeeper Samuel Willey, his wife, five young children and two hired men, was widely recorded in literature, art, travel writing, newspapers and scientific journals, and was the first national disaster in the US to capture national attention. Nineteenth-century Americans were intrigued with nature's sheer perversity in destroying an entire family while leaving its house untouched. Suddenly the White Mountains became, in the public's imagination, a mythical place where nature was preserved in its original, potent state. Artists and writers such as Thomas Cole, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Charles Lyell, began travelling there every summer to take vacations amid the romantic landscape, and the Willey house became one of the area's most popular attractions.
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