2-752-654 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Chimney Rocks', 1872. Unusual rock formation in West Virginia, USA: 'At the butt of a sharp spur rises a towering architectural mass, which any one familiar with the Old World would pronounce a well-preserved feudal ruin, and a purely American imagination would conceive to be the chimneys of a burnt factory...it is difficult to divest one's self of the idea that human hands must have played some part in the erection of the pile before us. So regular and square cut is the masonry, so shapely the towers, so artistically true the embattled summits, the supporting buttresses, the jutting turrets, the cold, gray walls, dappled with lichens, moss, and weather-stains-all combined so artfully to mimic the "ruined castle of romance", that the garish light of a summer morning is scarcely strong enough to dispel the illusion'. From "Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Mountains, Rivers, Lakes...with Illustrations on Steel and Wood by Eminent American Artists" Vol. I, edited by William Cullen Bryant. [D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1872]