A rock profile twelve hundred feet above this spot began to form some twenty-five thousand years ago during the great ice age, as a southward-moving glacier shaped the cliff and, after the glacier retreated, frost, wind, and rain caused the rocks of the face to take on a human form. The profile consists of five ledges, with three anchored deep in the cliff supporting the two above, and it measures forty feet from chin to forehead. Only from this angle do the stones appear as a man’s face. No legends survive showing that the region’s Indians worshipped it, and the first white explorers and settlers who traveled through the valley did not report seeing it. In eighteen oh five, while surveying in the Notch, Luke Brooks and Francis Whitcomb came here for water, and Brooks looked up, saw the face above the lake, and cried, “Its Jefferson,” referring to President Thomas Jefferson. Knowledge of the profile spread slowly until eighteen twenty-five, when a letter from General Martin Field was published in the American Journal of Science, but Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale “The Great Stone Face,” written in eighteen fifty, immortalized the Old Man of the Mountain. History does not record who first gave the profile its current name, though W.C. Prime, a world traveler and writer who first came to this region in eighteen fifty-nine, wrote, “It might elsewhere have been given a name. Here it has been always. The Old Man of the Mountain, otherwise name-less.”