1881 Guide to the White Mountains

I was impressed by the recent post concerning a digital copy of the 1922 AMC Guide, so I thought I'd post this.

While I was using Google Books, looking for something else a few days ago, I came up with this: Handbook for Travelers. A Guide to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and to the Adjacent Railroads, Highways and Villages ..., published in 1881 by James R. Osgood and Company. This was apparently one of a series of Travel Guides published by this company.

I've skimmed it briefly and it has an immense amount of material from this era, mostly directed to the well-to-do traveler.

If you are a history buff, this is definitely worth checking out.

Here's the Title Page:




And here's an add for a RR company (one of several such ads)

This is a later printing of Moses Sweetser's famous Guide (1876), the first and my favorite White Mountains hiking guide. Nobody ever wrote so well for the AMC, I'll bet.

It's just terrific.
I used this guide and a circa-1960 WMG to help me locate the discontinued trail to the Sugarloaf (Benton, NH) cliffs. I always check it before I set out. As it gives a historical context, it gives me things to re-discover. I have grown to really enjoy exploring abandoned areas or areas with a story to tell that's not written. Most certainly I follow the guidebooks when possible. I would love to find a similar guide for the Berks or Greens or Maine mountains.

It's now been reprinted and available for purchase. I grabbed a copy, it makes great camp and downtime reading. Gives me ideas for the next explore...

Great stuff. I have been noticing more and more old historical texts coming up in google searches (PDFs on google books and other digital libraries). It looks like the internet is finally becoming that comprehensive, digitized library we all knew it could, and hoped it would become.

Perhaps we should start an index (of hyperlinks) of hiking-related, historical books that are available digitally. However, the book index repository would probably be best kept on a hiking related website rather than in a hiking forum.

Google books seems to becoming more sophisticated as well. It looks like you can download the entire book as a PDF. Also you can view several pages at a time in a text mode. The text mode allows you to search, copy text to the clipboard, etc.

Somewhere the full, digitized book texts must be available (not just the full book in a PDF image, or in text subsets). Google searches must access the full book in text format, as they can instantly search and put up a customized full PDF with your searched words highlighted. Ultimately I would like to find a way to access entire books directly in that text format so that I could do additional follow-up searches within the book.

Good Find Papa Bear

I think links to this book have appeared before here, but still worth checking out. I just scanned through section on N Conway and came across description of trails on the Moats. Very interesting indeed! In 1881 trails were pretty recently extablished. At the time it was difficult cutting trails because of a big fire in 1854 which destroyed mature forests and left blackened skeletons of spruce making travel difficult. We're still benefiting from that fire 150 years later.

There's a way to apply tags to threads that you might want to come back to. Give a name like Osgood Guide.