[Rattlesnake Gal]

Thanks for the good wishes Just Sold. I'm making slow progress, but at least I can move a lot better than a few weeks ago.

According to Edgar H. Wilcomb in his publication "Winnipesaukee Lake Country Gleanings," 1923

The rough, broken region southwest of the Weirs, at the head of Lake Paugus, back to the Meredith hills, shows evidence of enormous volumes of water and ice having passed down this way, checked and turned in its southerly course by Racoon Mountain, forming a part of the westerly section of the great natural dam at Lakeport, indicating that the level of the water was high enough to flow north of Blacksnout Mountain, northwest of the Weirs, as well as between this mountain and the Gilford Mountains. Old Blacksnout must have withstood a terrific battering of water and ice cakes during the tremendous flow, before and after its tough old head was uncovered.

When the great dam broke at Lakeport, an immense flow of water must have started in that direction. Probably the bulk of the water first flowed through the valley comprising the present Intervale and Lily Pond section, east of the White Oaks hill, but it is obvious that there was another channel west of the White Oaks, at what is now the Weirs, and that the waters scoured out this channel so rapidly that it eventually became lower than the Intervale channel, until it constituted the only outlet of the lake.

Comparatively few people realize that all this great territory, in fact the greater part of New England, and probably a much larger section of the country, was once enshrouded in a solid mass of ice, estimated by geologists to have been hundreds of feet thick, and that when the climate changed, due to readjustments of the earth, constantly occurring, this ice-cap gradually melted and was carried along by enormous torrents of water, flowed down the valleys to the sea, as glaciers or moving ice-fields still do in Alaska and other parts of the world.

At this period the present site of Laconia and all the territory embraced in the basin bounded by the great natural dam at Lakeport, the hills east of Laconia, the Sanbornton hills and the elevated section west of Meredith Center was doubtless submerged by another lake of considerable size, somewhat lower than the others, held back by another big natural dam across the present valley between Belmont and Sanbornton, a considerable portion of which was swept away by the floods until the present valley and channel of the Winnipesaukee river was formed, leaving the small lake south of Lakeport and the larger one southwest of Laconia, separated by the sandbanks at Laconia.

The last ice flood which geologists have traced with care, traversed New England, crossed New Jersey, Pennsylvania and southern New York and followed the crooked course of the Ohio River. A branch also extended through the Dakotas, Montana and Nebraska, where numerous fossilized remains of animals and strange vegetation have been exhumed, unquestionably buried during the various glacial periods, millions of years ago in some instances.