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NEK Backcounty 3/27/14

Puck it

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 26, 2006
Messages
9,681
Points
48
Location
Franconia, NH
FYI. from AMC website


The Presidents
White settlers more typically named mountains after white leaders. That's what a group of seven men from the town of Lancaster, N.H., set out to do on July 31, 1820. They wanted to put some names on the map, perhaps knowing that once in print, a name was often picked up by later mapmakers and guidebook writers. So it was no coincidence that they brought along mapmaker Philip Carrigain, an important cartographer who would eventually get his own mountain. The naming party climbed Mount Washington, which was named for George Washington in 1784 for his military actions during the Revolution—he wasn't yet president. By the time the Lancaster men climbed the mountain, however, the former president was the sainted father of the country. They thought his peak deserved august company. That day they picked out appropriate prominences for the most prominent men of the day. With Carrigain's help, they honored John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe with mountains.
But the naming party still had mountains it wanted to name, so it added one for Benjamin Franklin—this being 1820, they had run out of presidents. They also named a nearby pinnacle Mount Pleasant, having apparently run out of better ideas. More presidents have since been added to the range. The USBGN supported a push to change the name of Mount Pleasant to Mount Eisenhower in 1970, shortly after the death of the former general and president. The Presidentials also include John Quincy Adams and Franklin Pierce, who got in because he was a New Hampshire native. (Some people still know the peak by its former name, Mount Clinton, after Dewitt Clinton, an important New York politician of the early 1800s.) In 2003, the New Hampshire legislature tried to add another president to the range, voting to change Mount Clay, named for 19th century statesman Henry Clay, to Mount Reagan. But the USBGN voted to keep the former name. In 2010, a peak in the Presidentials named simply Adams 4 was renamed Mount Abigail Adams to honor her life as wife and vital private counsel to John Adams. She was, of course, also the mother of John Quincy Adams.
Other presidents—both great and not so great—have been honored with mountain names elsewhere in the Whites. They are: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield (who was honored shortly after—and presumably because of—his assassination), Grover Cleveland (he summered nearby), and Calvin Coolidge (perhaps because, as a native Vermonter, he was a New Englander). Some people might think Mount Jackson should be added to the list, but that summit is named not for Andrew, the sixth president, but for Charles Thomas Jackson, a New Hampshire state geologist who conducted research in the Presidentials.
 
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