Chapter 1: Before the Beginning

View from Mt. Osceola

On a summer’s day in 1873, a trio of men stood on the summit of Mount Osceola, high above Waterville Valley in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. From this lofty vantage point, they could see the nearby Sandwich Range, the distinctive outline of Mount Carrigain, and the densely forested expanse of the Pemigewasset Wilderness. If the day was very clear, they could have seen the Presidential Range to the north, Lake Winnipesaukee to the south, and peaks of the Green Mountains to the west. A guidebook published that year claimed that on exceptionally crystalline days, one could see the Atlantic Ocean. The three had ascended the peak by way of a rough path from Waterville, possibly having stayed the night at the Greeley House, the valley’s only hotel in an area that attracted considerable summer tourist traffic.

How many of those annual tourists cared to climb mountains on foot is unknown, but at the time these men were in the minority. Two of the party, Edward Charles Pickering, age 27, and his teenage brother William, were experiencing their first summer in the White Mountains. They eschewed typical pursuits like carriage rides to scenic vistas, gentle walks on forest paths, and picnics beside bubbling streams. Arriving from Cambridge, Massachusetts, they were taking part in a city-dweller’s typical summer stay in the clean mountain air. However, they were there to explore the land on foot, fortunate to have found a willing accomplice in retired U.S. Army quartermaster and civil engineer Colonel Charles William Folsom. As they rested on the summit of Osceola that day, we can imagine Edward marveling at the thought of climbing all those mountains and wondering if others might hold the same interest in hiking and exploration. Though he did not know it yet, he was already building the community that would help him answer that question, and it would lead to the formation of America’s oldest outdoor recreation club.

Edward Charles Pickering

During Pickering’s climb up Mount Osceola there was talk of a society of sorts. Decades later William would recall a conversation the party had on that day about forming a club. That summer Pickering ascended several peaks both with trails and those presumed to be without. The few established trails that existed would have been rough, with smaller, inconvenient trees cut out of the way and the occasional blaze made by chipping off a section of tree bark with an axe to expose the lighter wood of the tree beneath. He often found himself hiking “one of those many summits said to be unclimbed and inaccessible … only to find them frequently visited and presenting no difficulty.” This was likely indicated by well-worn bushwhack routes, summit vegetation cleared by an industrious hiker or signs of frequent camping. Pickering saw this as a sure sign that others not only wished to climb the area’s peaks but also wanted to open new areas to exploration. He made the acquaintance of other recreationists in the mountains that season as well as seeking them out upon his return to Boston and Cambridge.

In fact, he ‘discovered’ a few of these fellow hikers not by meeting them in person but by spotting them in “Summit Registers.” Just as tourists used hotel guestbooks to announce their presence, hikers found a way to note their trips in the wild where no guestbook or front desks were to be found. Starting around the 1850s, hikers began to leave Summit Registers on or near White Mountain peaks. They consisted of small, rolled notebooks tightly sealed in jars, bottles or metal containers placed among the rocks of a cairn. It was through one such register on the summit of Mount Adams that Pickering met William Gray Nowell, another early advocate of forming something like AMC.

Over the next few summers, Pickering became part of the budding recreationist community of the White Mountains. By the summer of 1875 he was out hiking with several people who would be critical to the launch and success of AMC. Civil engineer John B. Henck, Jr., soon to be the club’s first secretary, in a letter to Appalachia journal on the club’s twenty-fifth anniversary, recalled that it was while “standing upon the summit of one of those mountains, I think Mt. Attitash, with Professor E.C. Pickering, that the first conversation on the desirability and feasibility of such a club took place between us.” 

Pickering let the club idea percolate as he focused on teaching, getting married, and setting up the very first physics teaching lab in the United States. Even when he did find time to formalize an outdoor organization, his life was incredibly full. The year AMC formed, not only was he a working professor at MIT but treasurer of the Boston Society of Natural History and recording secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In October 1876, he was elected the new director of the Harvard College Observatory. He officially took up his post on February 1, 1877, and would spend the next forty-two years making it one of the most respected observatories in the world.

Nonetheless, once Pickering had been bitten by the hiking and exploration bug, the genesis of a new club around that idea seemed almost inevitable. In the summer of 1875 Pickering stayed in the same lodgings as John B. Henck, where they “brought the plans of a Club into more definite shape.” At the end of that year, they rallied their White Mountain and local outdoor enthusiast friends to come together. About fifty postcards dated Jan. 1st, 1876, were printed and mailed to men who they saw as kindred spirits, stating: 

“DEAR Sir, 

You are hereby invited with your friends to attend a meeting of those interested in mountain exploration to be held at the Institute of Technology on Saturday, January 8th, at 3 P.M. 

Yours truly,

E.C. PICKERING”

  To be continued… 

The AMC Library & Archives hold thousands of photos spanning and chronicling 150 years of club history.  The Lary House photo seen here is the oldest image of club members in the collection, dating from our founding year. The White mountains and neighboring Adirondacks were only just starting to attract interest as a leisure destination, a product of a nascent affluent class in the America. You can access the digitized portion of the collection (which is always growing!) at outdoors.catalogaccess.com.