Editing Mount Monadnock (section)

==History==
===The transcendentalists===
[[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], [[Henry David Thoreau]], and [[Margaret Fuller]] visited the mountain and wrote fondly of it. Emerson was a frequent visitor, and made the mountain the subject of "Monadnoc",<ref>[http://www.monadnock.net/emerson/monadnoc.html "Monadnoc"]</ref> one of his most famous poems. Thoreau visited the mountain four times between 1844 and 1860, and spent a great deal of time observing and cataloging natural phenomena. He is regarded as having written one of the first serious naturalist inventories of the mountain. A bog near the summit of Mount Monadnock and a rocky lookout off the Cliff Walk trail are named after him; another lookout is named after Emerson.<ref name="baldwin"/>

<gallery widths="125px" heights="180px">
Image:Ralph-Waldo-Emerson-Rowse-Schloff.jpeg|Ralph Waldo Emerson
File:Benjamin D. Maxham - Henry David Thoreau - Restored - greyscale - straightened.jpg|Henry David Thoreau
</gallery>

===The Halfway House and other structures===
In 1858, Moses Cudworth of [[Rindge, New Hampshire|Rindge]] opened the "Halfway House" hotel on the south side of the mountain, roughly halfway from the base to the summit. The "Toll Road" was built to service it. By that time the popularity of the mountain was booming, and it was not long before Cudworth enlarged the hotel to accommodate 100 guests. On busy summer days, the stables at the Halfway House held as many as 75 horses. The Halfway House became public property when hundreds of residents of the nearby towns formed a coalition to buy the Toll Road and hotel, and worked to prevent a radio tower from being constructed on the summit. After the hotel burned down in 1954, a concession stand operated at the site until 1969. It and the toll road were both closed to public vehicles. Moses Spring, with its source in a hole drilled through a rock behind the site, is one of the few remaining artifacts of the hotel years. The foundations of two water tanks, and the nearby reservoir that fed them, are extant on the hillside above the Old Halfway House.<ref name="baldwin"/>

A small firewarden's hut was located on the summit of Mount Monadnock and operated from 1911 to 1948, when it was decommissioned with the advent of modern means of detecting forest fires. The hut was used as a snack bar concession and hikers' shelter until 1969; it was removed in 1972. A small cabin, located farther down the mountain, served as the fire lookout's residence. It, too, has been removed.<ref name="baldwin"/>

A private dwelling, {{convert|400|ft}} south of the site of the former Halfway House, is the last remaining inholding on the mountain above {{convert|1000|ft}}.

===Hiking history===
[[File:Autumn summit.JPG|thumb|left|Typical crowded summit of Mt. Monadnock on a sunny autumn day]]
The earliest recorded ascent of Mount Monadnock took place in 1725 by Captain Samuel Willard and fourteen rangers under his command who camped at the top and used the summit as a lookout while patrolling for [[Native Americans (United States)|Native Americans]]. Before the practice came to be frowned upon, many early hikers carved their names in the summit; the earliest such engraving reads "S. Dakin, 1801" and is attributed to a local town clerk.<ref name="baldwin"/>

Notable "power hiking" records associated with the mountain include that of Garry Harrington, who hiked to the summit 16 times in a 24-hour period, and Larry Davis, who claimed to have hiked to the summit daily for 2,850 consecutive days (7.8 years).<ref>{{usurped|1=[https://web.archive.org/web/20120731233111/http://www.monadnockmountain.com/10%20fun%20facts.htm Mount Monadnock.com]}} Retrieved December 14, 2007</ref><ref>[http://www.americanprofile.com/article/997.html American Profile.com] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081201084314/http://www.americanprofile.com/article/997.html |date=December 1, 2008 }} Retrieved December 14, 2007</ref> Davis has hiked the mountain over 7,250 times in the past 35 years.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.ledgertranscript.com/Reaching-the-peak-2058110 |title=Reaching The Peak |last=Handy |first=Nicolas |date=May 11, 2016 |publisher=www.ledgertranscript.com |access-date=April 25, 2023}}</ref>

Monadnock is often claimed to be the second-most frequently climbed mountain in the world, after [[Mount Fuji]] in [[Japan]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.monadnockmountain.com/ |title=Mount Monadnock |access-date=August 8, 2012 |url-status=usurped |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120730234054/http://www.monadnockmountain.com/ |archive-date=July 30, 2012 }}</ref> Monadnock is climbed by 125,000 hikers yearly,<ref name="baldwin"/> while Mount Fuji sees 200,000-300,000 hikers yearly.<ref>[http://www.env.go.jp/park/fujihakone/topics/090917a.html (Japanese)] Mt. Fuji climber numbers for up to FY 2009.</ref> However, according to [[UNESCO]], [[Mount Tai|Tai Shan]] in China receives more than 2 million visitors a year, far surpassing the other two peaks in popularity.<ref>See page 17 of this UNESCO report: https://whc.unesco.org/archive/periodicreporting/apa/cycle01/section2/437.pdf</ref>