dr_wu002 said:
I'm glad Arghman changed it although I'd like to get to the bottom of exactly what "Giles Mountain" was supposed to be.
my guess is it's not worth the effort. I looked at the edit history & discussion for that page. there is no debate / discussion / references or anything concerning Giles Mountain. The posting history shows the Giles Mountain got added during a bunch of edits on 15 Feb 2006 from someone who wasn't logged in so we can't even find out who put it there. The earlier history of the page just shows the 4000-footers (listed in the Delorme guide, which they used as a reference); the use of the Delorme guide listed under "References" is now misleading & should probably be removed or at least qualified.
I don't put much faith in any sources (online or not) that don't cite references. Here's an example (tangential to this topic) -- I did a bunch of research 4 or 5 years ago on the dates of grant/incorporation of the New Hampshire towns. It was very difficult (missing data on exact grant date of Bethlehem in 1774, too close to the Revolution; the 4 original towns, Hampton, Portsmouth, Dover, and Exeter don't really have any formal act of incorporation; there seems to be some records missing for Alton, Wolfeboro, and Greenland; and Harts Location is not really an incorporated township, except that it is, more or less, by virtue of acting like an incorporated township). There's a lot of misinformation out there on the unincorporated townships. Some of it is promulgated by the Union Leader, which didn't cite its sources; some of it was promulgated by the NH Manual of the General Court, the so-called "Red Book" provided to members of the NH house/senate (I picked up a 1965 copy at a used book store), which has a few errors and didn't cite its sources; and the online sources are even worse. One example of this is no longer on line but is available through the Internet Archive (again:
warning, this has errors) at
http://web.archive.org/web/20050305...roonline.com/towninfo/statistics/nhtowns.html My guess is that this site scanned in the information from the Red Book, since the wording is exactly the same as my copy except for random typos & changes in house/senate districting (which would be a clue in determining from which year's book it was scanned in!). Their dates for Beans Grant (1855, it should be 1835) and Beans Purchase (1812, it should be 1832) are wrong, and again, they (whoever "they" is) didn't cite the Red Book as a source.
This chain seems to have continued in Wikipedia for the
Beans Purchase entry which doesn't cite sources, and most likely used the Wolfeboro Online (or its predecessor/successor in this misinformation chain) as a source since it shares the same wrong date of incorporation.
End tangent. Let's waste our time by talking about hiking instead.
