Intervale Scenic Vista

Before the White Mountains became a tourist destination, over 400 19th-century artists made them one, painting dramatic vistas to sell both art and the idea of wilderness itself. The Intervale view became so iconic that the Cannell family, who ran the local inn and country store, donated the land to preserve it in 1967. Now a state rest area, it features reproductions of those promotional paintings and a battered red payphone that travelers once used to call loved ones while gazing at Mount Washington, a relic as stubborn as the mountains themselves.

The Cannells understood the transaction better than most. Their inn burned down in 1948, and rather than fight the view for real estate, they handed it to the state outright, a gesture memorialized today on a small plaque thanking Raymond and Lydia Cannell for “the gift of this land and the Intervale Vista.” It is a rare case of a family choosing to sell the scenery and nothing else. The painters had the same instinct a century earlier: Benjamin Champney, the closest thing the White Mountain School had to a founder, moved to North Conway in 1858 and spent the rest of his career convincing wealthy easterners that this particular notch of granite and pine was worth the train fare. He was right, and the evidence is still parked at the pull off, where a coin operated relic waits patiently for a call that, these days, almost never comes.