2-752-659 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Falls of the Blackwater', 1872. Waterfalls in West Virginia, USA: 'Just below us flows the famous Blackwater through an awful rift nearly two thousand feet in depth...This is the land of water-falls...Now it is deliciously refreshing to breathe this atmosphere of whirling spray, to witness the wild gambols of these frisky streams, to hear the chorus of their thousand voices, from the tinkling treble of the tiny rill to the thundering bass of the distant river...The first leap made by the Skillet Fork is forty feet in the clear, and thence without a halt she goes plunging down a break-neck stairway, with a descent of some four or five hundred feet in half a mile's distance, where she joins the main stream of Blackwater'. 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]