08/22/2026
Witnesses: Tell them the Willey Slide was here
In 1826, nine souls succumbed to a tragedy we still can’t forget
BY TOM EASTMAN
THE CONWAY DAILY SUN
CRAWFORD NOTCH — Ever get a case of the Willeys driving down through Crawford Notch on a dark and stormy night?
Two hundred years ago come Friday, Aug. 28, the thunderous skies opened and caused a torrent here that led to a cascading mudslide and flood waters to rise in the neighboring S**o River. In all, seven members of the farming and innkeeping Willey family and two of their farm workers were killed.
The 1826 tragedy became widely known through newspaper and magazine illustrations using the then-cutting-edge technology of woodblock engravings that depicted the mountainous deluge.
Remarkably, the house they ran from to escape the slide was left unscathed, as the slide was diverted by a large boulder behind the home. Which leads one to ponder, why didn’t they just stay in the house? “There’s a lot of conjecture about that,” said Phil Franklin, president of the Bartlett Historical Society, which is housing an exhibit about the slide that includes artifacts on loan from the Conway Historical Society, such as a brick from the house and a framed patchwork of clothing taken from the site, along with a lithograph of the slide.
In another nod to the Willey Slide’s 200th anniversary, local historian Bob Cottrell is giving a talk, entitled “From Terror to Tourism,” at the White Mountain Museum & Gallery in North Conway on Thursday, Aug. 27.
Cottrell is the curator of the Henney History Room at the Conway Public Library and the Jackson Historical Society. Cottrell gave a similar talk at the library on Aug. 19, in which he provided such nuggets as the incorrect way early artists depicted the slide.
For example, painter Thomas Cole showed the site as being the top of the notch at Elephant Head, which is actually over 3 miles away.
In addition, the State Parks Department will hold a ceremony on Friday, Aug. 28, at the Willey House site at 11 a.m., and an interpretive program will be offered by Elizabeth Peel from the State Parks Historic Sites Bureau.
It all serves to keep the story alive. “They were known to be a very religious family,” said Franklin. “There are accounts that say the Bible found on a table in the house was opened to Psalm 18 (“The earth trembled and quaked, and the foundations of the mountains shook; they trembled because He was angry...”), and one thought floated was that they heard this coming slide and they felt as though the devil was roaring against them and they were running away from that.”
A rock slide, Franklin went on, “sounds pretty awful. You might think it’s coming down on top of you, not knowing that there was a geological feature above the house to save you. And, it’s possible they feared the rising water of the flooding and raging S**o.”
Killed were Samuel Willey Jr. (father, age 38); Polly Lovejoy Willey (mother, age 35); Eliza Willey (daughter, age 13); Jeremiah Willey (son, age 11); Martha Willey (daughter, age 9); Elbridge Gerry Willey (son, age 7); and Sally Willey (daughter, age 5); along with hired workers David Allen (age 37) and David Nickerson (age 21).
The family’s bodies, once located, were buried at the site but that December, their remains were reinterred in a small cemetery behind what is now the Moat Mountain Smokehouse in North Conway as Samuel Willey Sr. owned that farmhouse.
The body of Allen was interred in the Garland Ridge Cemetery in Bartlett Village, according to Franklin. It is believed Nickerson remained interred at the Willey site.
After the tragic slide, the site became an early epicenter for “disaster tourism” in the White Mountains, drawing travelers eager to see the house and collect souvenirs. And the site continues to fascinate us.
The Crawford Notch information center offers displays as well as books about it, while a rock bears a memorial plaque erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1925 a year before the 100th anniversary.
That centennial anniversary drew a gathering of about 1,000.
The tragedy captured the imaginations of such famous writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published “The Ambitious Guest” in 1835 and penned such lines as “Alas! They had quitted their security, and fled right into the path of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain in a cataract of ruin ... Long ere the thunder of the Great Slide had ceased to roar among the mountains, the mortal agony had been endured, and the victims were at peace.”
Among other accounts was one written by ninth-generation Willey family descendant Rex Wiley of Fryeburg, Maine. (And no, he did not remove an “L” from his last name — he descends from the Willeys on his mother’s side of the family.)
A 2021 book by Wiley is available in the Crawford Notch State Park. It is entitled, “The Willey House Crawford Notch, N.H. History, Facts and Folklore.”
Wiley worked as an interpretive ranger at the site for nine years right up until last year and compiled the pocket-sized book after gathering stories about the incident. Wiley writes that the Willey house was built in 1792-93 by a Mr. Davis as the Notch Farm. He says it was the first hotel in the Notch and had a succession of managers.
According to Wiley’s book, the Samuel Willey Jr. family left their Bartlett home (later known as the Lady Blanche House) on West Side Road in the fall of 1825 and moved to the Notch Farm. “Through the winter of 1825-26 and the early summer, repairs and improvements were done to the house by Samuel and two hired men.
The summer of 1826 appears to have been doomed by a severe drought. Vegetation was unable to grow and the soil turned into several inches of powder,” writes Wiley.
The family, he said, witnessed two small slides near the home that June, which led them build a small shelter across the road and below the house.
As Wiley and so many other writers have chronicled, the drought broke on Aug. 28 — the same date, ironically, that Tropical Storm Irene ravaged the White Mountains in 2011.
In 1979, it was my first summer here when I wrote my own story about the Willey slide for The Mountain Ear newspaper founded by my late brother Steve Eastman. (Read it at mtearchronicles.com.)
The Willey House, although spared by the 1826 landslide, the house burned to the ground in 1899. The current Crawford Notch State Park info center was built on its site.
The Willeys’ nearest neighbors were four miles to the east and eight to the west. In front of the house was a small clearing, across from which flowed the S**o River, which was normally a trickle in summer but became a mud-boiled torrent in spring when the rains melted the snow.
The road leading up through the Notch, now Route 302, was long, rough and steep. The area also is somewhat gloomy, as night comes early to the Narrows due to overhanging Mount Willey, which was later named after the doomed family.
The family received a forewarning of the fate that awaited them on June 26, two months prior to the great slide. Abel Crawford, after whose family the Notch is named, was at work with a crew of men on the turnpike which bisected the area, when a heavy rainstorm broke out and forced the men to take shelter with the Willey family.
Looking out a window, the Willeys saw a cascade of rocks and earth crashing down the mountainside in back of their home, taking all in its path. Whole trees were thrown down, standing upright for distances of ten rods (165 feet) or more before tipping over, and the mass finally stopped on a level surface across the road.
Mrs. Willey reportedly was frightened by this initial warning, and urged her husband to harness the horses so that the family could go to Abel Crawford’s. Willey felt that the road would be full of washouts and obstacles from the slide, however, and that the family was much safer in the cabin, so they remained.
After the storm, he looked for a better house site, but eventually decided that the family would be safe staying where they were.
As a precaution, though, he placed a good cart body away from the house so that the family could find shelter should they need to escape in the event of another slide.
The two-month-long summer drought ended on the morning of Aug. 28, 1826, with one of the heaviest downpours ever to strike the White Mountains.
Samuel Willey’s brother Benjamin, the Congregational minister in North Conway, had been preaching the day before the storm, in a town to the south. While driving home that Monday, he noticed that the clouds were blacker and greater in volume than he had ever seen before.
In his 1856 book, “Incidents in White Mountain History,” Benjamin wrote that the clouds “reminded one of some heavy armed legions moving slowly and steadily into battle ... covering the mountains ... fold after fold with their solemn dark drapery.”
The rain lasted until midnight. Then, as suddenly as it had developed, the storm cleared.
Down in the valley, Benjamin noted destruction that had occurred overnight, with uprooted trees, displaced rocks and gouged tracks where the water had flowed.
On that Tuesday morning, he and the rest of the valley were unaware of the terror that had occurred the previous night high in Crawford Notch.
A man named Barker was the first person traveling down through the Notch that Tuesday, either heading to his home in Effingham or over to Bridgton, Maine.
Barker had received help from Ethan Allen Crawford late in the afternoon in crossing the river, which by 4 p.m. had dropped after the heavy rain of the night before. The road through the Narrows was blocked in places by 15- to 20-foot craters and fallen trees.
He reached the Willey House about dark; the structure untouched but deserted. The barn in back was destroyed by the slide and two horses were dead, but two cows pinned under the collapsed timbers were still alive, as was the family dog.
Inside, the lone walker found the house in disarray, with clothing and belongings scattered. He said that on a table lay the Bible, opened to the 18th Psalm which reads, “The Lord thundered in the heavens ... Then the channels of water were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered at thy rebuke ...”
After spending an unbearable night in the deserted cabin listening to the moaning of the pinned cows trapped in the barn, Barker on Wednesday morning set out for Bartlett with news of the tragedy, although not until he was able to free the animals.
Word soon spread all over the valley, and in the late afternoon, parties of searchers began to converge on the house.
Ethan Allen Crawford, and a Rev. Wilcox started down the Notch early Wednesday, first by wagon, and then by foot due to the gutted condition of the road. Near the Willey House, they found the freed cows, their bags filled, not having been milked since the day before the storm and slide.
Crawford, realizing what had probably happened to the Willeys, wanted to keep moving on down the Notch to his father’s, but Wilcox felt he must return to Ethan’s at the top of the Notch, and Ethan guided the minister back.
Ethan returned later in the afternoon and found the neighbors from the valley and the lower part of the Notch waiting at the Willey House.
No trace of the missing nine occupants had been located. But the next day, Thursday the 31st, the searchers found the bodies of Samuel and Polly Willey, the hired man David Allen, and the youngest child.
The bodies were taken up and placed in coffins, and interred the next day near the house. They remained there for the winter before being removed to the family burial ground, situated behind the former Carriage Inn in North Conway, behind Moat Mountain Smokehouse & Brewing.
The Rev. Benjamin Eastman and the other hired man’s younger brother, George Nickerson, continued the search and on Sunday, while gathering material for a raft, found a straw mattress floating along the wreckage in the river.
A few minutes later, poling the raft into mid-stream, they found the body of the eldest child, 12-year-old Eliza Ann. No bruises or marks were found on her body, and it was generally assumed that she had drowned.
None of the other children were found, swallowed by the rubble or swept away by the rain-swelled river sometime during the night of the storm.
The other hired man, David Nickerson, was finally found by his brother on Thursday.
A brother of Samuel Willey’s claimed he had a dream in which his dead brother told him that the family had feared that the rising waters of the S**o would sweep away the house, so they left it for higher ground, right into the path of the slide.
How the house was left standing was explained by the Rev. Eastman. The slide, he said, uncovered a huge boulder on the slope above the house.
Mountain debris made channels around the rock on either side of the house.
According to the Rev. Eastman, a log lay high above all the other debris accumulated against the house. Had it not been for the uncovered boulder diversion of the water and slide, the 25-foot log would have hit the house like a battering ram.”
Franklin this week shared that the Bartlett Historical Society gained further insights to the disaster last year when they acquired a pamphlet published in 1880 that tells that the story of the Willey family disaster.
Entitled, “A Sketch of the Destruction of the Willey Family by the White Mountain Slide of the Night of Aug. 28, 1826,” they acquired it from the Clermont Historical Society in Florida.
The narrative was written by Edward Melcher and published in 1880, when he was 84. (Melcher’s accounts are also published in Wiley’s book).
“Melcher was one of the 12 men who made their way to the Willey family site and recovered their bodies. This is the only first-hand account we have seen,” continued Franklin.
“In it, he adds another story of the Ebenezer Stillings family who were in the same flood from the storm that killed the Willeys, plus he adds some information from Mrs. Ethan Crawford’s book, ‘Guide and Historical Relics of the White Mountains,’ which tells of the tales of her husband, Ethan Allen Crawford.”
In the pamphlet, Melcher dismisses some of the accounts by those who were not present, unlike himself, noting there was no dog there as purported by other second-hand accounts and that he first discovered the first bodies by noticing the presence of flies.
“It may be rough on the dog to spoil this beautiful story,” scoffed Melcher, “yet it is of more importance that history should record facts as they actually existed and not as fancy would paint them.”
He confirmed that the house was saved by an unearthed boulder or ledge.
“As the Willey House stood directly in the line of the avalanche, it would have been swept away but for a rock near the corner of the house, well sunken in the ground, which proved to be a barrier that turned the current by first arresting a large spruce tree and then what was immediately behind, till the mass was piled up as high as the house, and so near I could easily step from the rubbish to the top of the building. Thus the house was saved and the cam they failed to reach was swept away.”
His account also tells of finding the bodies of David Allen and Mrs. Willey near one another, both badly mangled, “especially about their heads.”
After the slide, and the notoriety it brought, a 50-bed hotel was built at the site by Horace Fabyan in 1845.
While the structure survived the famous 1826 landslide that claimed the lives of the Willey family, the building and its later hotel additions were completely destroyed by the fire in September 1899 due to a defective chimney.
The state of New Hampshire acquired the Willey House site in 1913 — as part of a legislative purchase that secured most of the surrounding Crawford Notch to protect the land from heavy timber harvesting — to create Crawford Notch State Park.
In 1922, the Willey House clearing was leased to a pair of entrepreneurs from Bartlett, who built a cabin colony of peeled spruce logs for vacationers.
More log buildings were added, including restrooms, a restaurant and gift shop, but eventually the state took back the clearing for its own operations.
The state continues those operations today. In an interview on Wednesday after his talk at the Conway library, Cottrell was asked why the Willey Slide has captivated the imagination of writers, artists and the public throughout the years.
“I think it is the attraction in a strange way to things that give you that sense of awe and fear … that sense of wonder. It’s why we have so many murder mysteries on TV, right? When something terrible happens, you want to go there and see it. You stand there and you think, ‘it could’ve happened to me,’ but you’re glad it didn’t.”
Likewise, Wiley told the Sun this week that part of the allure is the mystery — and that the mystery belongs to the departed to keep.
“When I worked up there, I had a person ask me if it bothered me that we don’t have all the answers. I said it didn’t, that we don’t have to know everything. It’s their secret...They were a family trying to make a living, same as us.”
Cottrell’s Aug. 27 lecture will be the third in the White Mountain Museum’s Summer series of public outreach programs. At the event, they will raffling off two original framed etchings to benefit the Jackson Historical Society’s ongoing town hall renovations.
The first of the set is by W.H Bartlett, “The Willey House,” from 1839, and the second is, “The Willey Slide” from 1872 by Richardson. The drawing will take place on Aug. 28, the anniversary of the disaster.
The event is to start at 4:30 p.m. with a reception followed at 6 p.m. by the talk. Reservations are required due to limited space. RSVP at Info@ WhtMtn.Art or call (603) 387-7737. Donations are appreciated to support the museum’s non-profit mission. The museum is located at 2541 White Mountain Highway, North Conway.
Finally, there’s that question of whether the phrase “getting the willies” is related to the tragic slide. Here in New Hampshire, we like to think it is. It’s part of our local lore in the White Mountains, where a good tale is hard to resist — and that of the Willeys tops the list of just how badly things can go wrong on any given day, summer included.
