The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains

The Meadow Brook Girls in the Hills, The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains is a girls’ adventure novel by Janet Aldridge, another entry in the long running Meadow Brook Girls series. The series, published by the Saalfield Publishing Company across the second decade of the twentieth century, followed four American schoolgirls through outdoor adventures in various settings, with each book devoted to a particular season, location, and set of activities.

In this volume the four girls, Harriet Burrell, Jane McCarthy, Margery Brown, and Hazel Holland, are spending their summer holiday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The story involves a hiking and camping expedition through the higher country of the White Mountain region, with the missing pilot of the subtitle referring to one of the small mysteries the girls encounter and eventually help to solve during their stay in the mountains. There are sequences of strenuous hiking, camping in remote locations, encounters with the kind of moderate physical danger that the series consistently allowed its protagonists to navigate successfully, and the careful demonstration of practical outdoor skills that gave the books their educational dimension.

The White Mountain setting is one of the better choices in the series for atmospheric storytelling. The region had become a major focus of American outdoor recreation by the early twentieth century, with the establishment of the White Mountain National Forest in 1918 reflecting the broader public interest in the area’s mountain landscape. The book draws on the geographical and recreational reality of the region and would have been recognized by many of its young readers, particularly those from New England, as a description of country they had themselves visited.

Like the other books in the series, this volume combines adventure plot with the careful instruction in outdoor skills and moral character that was the consistent purpose of the early twentieth century series fiction for young people. The girls demonstrate competence in map reading, in fire making, in shelter construction, in basic first aid, and in the various other skills that the outdoor recreation movement of the period was promoting as essential to good citizenship and personal development.

The book is short and reads quickly. For readers interested in early twentieth century American girls’ series fiction or in the history of the American outdoor recreation movement, this is a representative example. It pairs naturally with the other Meadow Brook Girls volumes.