Grandfather Glen Brook: A Biography
February 5, 2025
3 min read

To those who have not met him, I’d like to introduce Grandfather Glen Brook, a true rock of the Glen Brook community. He has been a listening ear for the hopes and dreams of many who have visited with him under the eaves of the hemlock forest on Glen Brook’s lakeshore, and he has gained a well-earned reputation for patience and discretion. He will listen carefully to all your troubles, and never repeat a single secret that is whispered into his ear.
As a small granite boulder, we can assume that, like all granite, Grandfather Glen Brook was formed in a slow-cooling underground pool of magma before rising to the surface through the various forces of geologic uplift. He certainly began as part of a much bigger mass of granite and was broken off, perhaps by the grinding of the same ice sheet, thousands of feet thick, that helped form Mt. Monadnock and the surrounding landscape. Time and weather have since worked upon his features (as they do upon us all) to shape him into the kindly old gentleman that many see when they wander down his forest path.
If he would talk, he could tell us of the changes he has seen in the millennia since the last ice age. He has stood witness as the little Brook that flows just to the northeast slowly wore down the stone to form the Glen that the waterfall cascades out of today. More recently, in the mid-1800’s, he saw the surrounding forest (ancient by our standards, but hardly by his) clear-cut to make way for sheep pastures bounded by stonewalls. It must have been odd, after so much time, to feel the warm sun sparkle off the mica inclusions on his stone-bald head. The forest that stands around him today is young, as forests go, with few trees more than about 150 years old. In 1920, a dam was built just downstream on the Glen Brook, bringing the water’s edge within thirty yards of where Grandfather Glen Brook sits, and creating the sparkling pond that campers splash and play in today.
The next time you find yourself meandering along the lakeshore, take some time, in the fern-scented shade, to wander up his quartz-lined path. You may whisper a wish or a dream in his ear, or simply share, for a quiet moment, the long perspective of granite on our ever-changing world.
Written by: Ellen Schmidt