2-752-655 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Karr's Pinnacles', 1872. Unusual rock formation 'eighteen miles above Petersburg', West Virginia, USA: '...we see two thin sheets of rock, towering perpendicularly, side by side, far above the tops of the loftiest forest-trees, their jagged and grotesque outlines drawn in dark silhouette against the clear-blue sky. The edge presentation exhibits a pair of monuments, one of which bears a rude resemblance to the obelisk of Luxor, the other to a monumental spire of the pinnacled Gothic style...I should say they exceeded two hundred feet in height, with a tapering width of from ten to five feet...Staring like grim Cyclopean skeletons through the lonely wood, they have "a fiendish look", and we feel a creeping terror in their presence...Our picture, though technically correct, has quite failed to catch the haunted aspect of the locality'. 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]