Published in The Yale Literary Magazine in November 1861, Howard Kingsbury’s “A Summer Experience” offers a vivid, first-hand account of the Yale Glee Club’s time in New Hampshire’s White Mountains at the height of the region’s 19th-century tourism era. Kingsbury writes of their stay at the Profile House, then one of the most celebrated grand hotels in the mountains, and of excursions into the surrounding landscape, including a visit to John Merrill at the Pool at the Flume. Blending personal reflection with careful observation, the essay captures the rhythms of travel, hospitality, and natural wonder that defined the New England experience for generations of summer visitors—and provides a rare glimpse of places and people that shaped the history of our region.

Tucked along a bend of the Pemigewasset River, Woodstock, New Hampshire is a town that has been rewritten more than once—first as Fairfield, then as Peeling, and finally as the mountain village we know today. Its story is one of reinvention shaped by stubborn granite, fast water, and the long reach of the logging era that once swept through the White Mountains. From the early settlers who tried to coax a living from thin hillside soils, to the rivermen guiding vast log drives down to Lowell, to the boardinghouses and grand hotels that welcomed summer travelers off the Boston & Maine trains, Woodstock grew in fits and starts, pulling itself down from the hilltop and toward the river that ultimately defined it. In the shadow of Mount Cilley, where cellar holes of old Peeling sleep beneath second-growth trees, you can still trace the outlines of a town that has lived many lives—and continues to negotiate its place between wilderness and the world beyond it.