New Hampshire fourth graders read Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Great Stone Face" (1850), in which a young boy, Ernest, grows up in a town in the shadow of the Old Man of the Mountain. There is a prophecy that a child born nearby is "destined to become the greatest and noblest personage of his time, and [his] countenance, in manhood, should bear an exact resemblance to the Great Stone Face."