Class 
 
 Copyright N"_ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
BERKSHIRE 
 COUNTY . . . 
 
 Land 
 
 Waters 
 
 Climate 
 
 Minerals 
 
 Plants 
 
 Animals 
 
 Occupations 
 
 Government 
 
 Literature 
 
 History 
 
 t 
 
 PITTSFIELD 
 PUBLIC 
 SCHOOLS . . 
 
 1904 
 
 'i-: 
 
^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 This outline was compiled nine or ten years ago by tlie teachers 
 of Grade IV., at the suggestion of the Superintendent and in co-oper- 
 ation with hini, and was for some years available thru mimeograph 
 copies in the hands of the teachers. In 1901, it was printed for the 
 use of the pupils. In the revision for printing, numerous changes 
 were made in the text and many illustrative extracts were added. 
 In the present edition some further revisions have been made. 
 
 As rxpres'^ed in 1lie annual report of 1804. the motive is three- 
 fold : 
 
 "1. To train the pupils to ob.serve and think, and to express their 
 thoughts freely and correctly^ both orally and In writing. 
 
 2. To give local and practical illustrations of geographical terms 
 and ideas, thus building the information and culture work of the first 
 three years into a foundation for broader knowledge. 
 
 3. To give the pupils such a knowledge of their own home as we 
 expect them to get later of the whole world, that it may be both an in- 
 spiratidn and an illustration to them in their further study." 
 
 It is believed, also, that patriotism has its roots in the love of 
 home. The more the children of Pittsfield and Berkshire County 
 know of the great men, the great thoughts, and the great deeds 
 that have had their origin here, the stronger will be the ties that 
 bind them to these hills, the more earnestly and resolutely will they 
 promote and defend the interests that center here. 
 
 Among those from whom valuable suggestions have been re- 
 ceived are Mr. Joseph Ward Lewis, Mr. Rollin H. Cooke, Rev. C 
 J. Palmer, Mr. H. H. Ballard, Mr. Robert C. Rockwell^ and Mr. W. 
 G. Harding. For the use of a number of the illustrations thanks 
 are due to Messrs. Plumb and Clark, Col. W. H. Phillips, The Sun 
 Printing Company, The Eagle Publishing Company, Williams Col- 
 lege, Rand, McNally and Company, and to Houghton, Mifflin and 
 Company, sole authorized publishers of the works of Oliver Wen- 
 dell Holmes. 
 
 Only the portions in larger type are required. It is hoped, 
 however^ that the portions in smaller type are of sufficient interest 
 to secure attention and appreciation. 
 
 By the courtesyof the Berkshire Life Insurance Company, tlie 
 pupils' of Grade IV. are supplied with its excellent map of Berk- 
 shire County. 
 
 >i* 
 
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 LlBn«RT nf OOneRESS 
 Tvro OoDiBS Recetwd 
 
 SEP 14 1904 
 ^^Oopyttftrt Entry 
 
 CLAM (2. XXc No. 
 ■^ d' ^ <J> -J-. 
 ' C«PY B 
 
 / 
 
 BERKSHIRE COUNTY 
 
 Copyright, 1904, 
 By Eugene Bouton. 
 
 I, 
 
 LAND. 
 
 Berkshire is the extreme western county of the state of Massa- 
 chusetts. It is bounded on the north for fourteen miles by Ben- 
 nington County in the state of Vermont and for about four miles by 
 the town of Monroe, which belongs to Franklin County, Mass. The 
 counties of Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden lie next east of 
 Berkshire, the dividing line being somewhat irregular. The south- 
 ern line of the county runs for about twenty-four miles along the 
 northern boundary of Litchfield County, in the state of Connecticut. 
 The western boundary of the state and county, dividing them from 
 the state of New York, is about hfty miles long. The average 
 breadth of the county is about twenty miles. Its area is about 950 
 square miles. 
 
Berha 
 
 :»Avn Sta. I „>v;y, 
 
 vX. Adams 
 
 '■0 ^ y * omiie 
 
 KIT' buUlll /- 
 y/^r 111 1 (oi'n V I . _^'-%- » - "-"lien 
 
 ' ilarhort 
 
 / 
 
 / ^/^^^^ 1 *t /^Cheshire V%ife *1 
 
 
 -• ^^'li «^^ " Pontoosiic;o < 
 
 Coltsville 
 
 
 Daltuu 
 
 /junoiion/ 
 
 *fltsfield 
 
 /^ 
 
 , / West 
 fCentcr° 
 
 /if A X Av;/pitt»fleM 
 ' New Lenox 
 
 ..iohinond ^ 
 
 ifhinond I LenoX 
 / ] I Lenox bta 
 
 iliitellne Smkbniai i 
 
 YVestTlf I Lenox. 
 
 Interljiken^Ea 
 
 Lee 
 ,<^5^\stocWbridgel 
 
 iislliniftoii. ^— ' 
 
 ^^^ 
 
 '"ms 
 
 WAifo°r\ imJHons^toTiic ', 
 
 / i<mj,U.C\ \ 1 1 an Ue'usenvUle Sta^N 
 
 BcekeF 
 
 niddli^noia Sia/n ,o , y,, 
 Bantrori/p. ^S«^5^ '3 
 
 ieckei Otenter o^ vC"!,'' 
 
 l" Ringvijft V* 
 Mldd|eOeld I ° \. *^ 
 
 V South V 
 W^ortliingtotf-. •*; , 
 
 "'J^,, y North 
 
 j^ LonO 
 " West Beckel 
 
 ''^e^ XTyrlngliam 
 
 ['el o\ S/iW Laic\ ^^, 
 
 CheStfc 
 
 TLittlevilleA . i \ 
 
 Vundeusen 
 
 
 / o E^rT^'cti fpre^t Earringtor f ^„,^w,;\ 
 
 1/ "SX • I S% .i- Buely — ^^y/ ° 
 
 / South Vv ~4^i^'*.,%v / SpeCarU, 
 
 l^fkM \l Wif ?||/'5 „New Marlboro 
 
 ^landaf | p / 1>\ ^"^J,^/- \ ^ South Sand isfield" 
 
 Otis ,1 \Lalci:t 
 
 , Hontvllle^ 
 
 A^. Mtatloie Pon 
 North Rlandron 
 
 ji/O/t^PoiC? 
 
 - roir, < 
 
 *'•« 
 
 .^ 
 
 ■Test GrjHitli'io 
 
 Oraiivllle 
 Center 
 
 J', 
 
 .■'•^^^'rt'i^ 
 
 ^•^/•o«.i 
 
 H 
 
The Mountains of this section have a regular increase of ele- 
 vation from a height of about 900 feet in Connecticut to over 3,500 
 feet in nortliern Massachusetts. Here Greylock, the highest moun- 
 tain in the state, lifts its majestic head to a height of 3,505 feet.* 
 The great Berkshire valley, tho divided and subdivided, is enclosed 
 within mountain walls which make it one. This valley, with its 
 adjoining hillsides and mountain tops, includes most of the county. 
 
 The Mountain Range on the East is the Hoosac. It has 
 been made famous by the Hoosac Tunnel. This tunnel is bored 
 thru the base of one of the highest parts of the mountain in a 
 straight line four and three-fourths miles long. About half way 
 thru the tunnel there is a ventilating shaft more than 1,000 feet high 
 leading to the surface. 
 
 The Taconic Mountains are on the west and form a narrow 
 range, which begins on the north at the Hoosac River valley and 
 runs into hills in Connecticut on the south. Between the Hoosac 
 range and the Taconic range lie two or three separate groups. The 
 Greylock group, lying between the central and the extreme north- 
 ern parts of the county, is the most important. It extends for sev- 
 eral miles north-south and east-west. Another narrower group, or 
 range, extends from Pittsfield to Great Barrington along the west- 
 ern line of Lenox and Stockbridge. 
 
 The Taconic Range and the Hoosac Range constitute the great- 
 est source of Berkshire's beauty. These ranges form a valley from 
 five to ten miles wide. The broad valley is made up of many smaller 
 valleys lying between spurs of the main mountain ranges and groups. 
 
 The Berkshire Hills are Famous for their beauty. Which- 
 ever way one looks, the mountains form a background. One of the 
 finest backgrounds is made by the Taconics in the southwest corner 
 of the county. Here, in the town of Mt. Washington, the Dome, 
 also called Mt. Everett, rises to a height of 2,624 feet above the 
 level of the sea. 
 
 * Saddle Ball, another peak of the Greylock group, i.s 3,300 feet high. Berlin Mountain 
 on the line between Williamstowii and New York, and several points in the northern part of 
 the town of Florida, are 2.800 feet high. 
 
Saddle Ball. Greylock. 
 
 THE GREYLOCK GROUP. 
 (Looking from South Mountain norttiward over Pittsfield.) 
 
 Our mountains, wood-crowned, ciieer tlie gazing eye, — 
 Whence bursting rills in constant murmurs flow: 
 
 Health vigorous walks beneath th' untainted sky. 
 And peace and joy our heaven-bless'd dwellings know. 
 :» Xs « 4: « « * 
 
 Old Greylock at the north uplifts his head. 
 And kindly looks on Learning's vale below; 
 
 And southward, Washington, of bulk outspread, 
 O'erpeers rich plains, where winding rivers flow. 
 
 Yon Saddle-Mountain in its azure hue. 
 All-mingled with the thoughts and scenes of yore, 
 
 Oh, with what joy it rises to thy view. 
 
 Son of Pontoosuc! at thy home once more? 
 
So every son of Berkshire turns his eye 
 
 To some old mountain-head, of much-loved form, 
 Majestic rising in the cloudless sky, 
 Or turban'd thick with drapery of the storm. 
 Stanzas selected from a poem delivered at the Berkshire Jubilee, Aug. 
 22, l^-'t-i, by William Allen, D. D. 
 
 Making every allowance that ought to be made, it must be conceded 
 tl^at in no county in the state, and in few in the Union will there be 
 found more fine scenery than in this of ours. On its southern border we 
 have Taghcannic mountain with its Bashbishe. Then we have those 
 "gray old rocks," 
 
 "That seem a fragment of some mighty wall 
 Built by the hand that fashioned the old world 
 To separate the nations, and thrown down 
 When the flood drowned them." 
 And then we have Gray Lock, the highest point in the state, giving a vie'W 
 that for vastness and sublimity is equalled by nothing in New England 
 except the White Hills. And then how much of beauty there is in a ride 
 through the length of the county, whether it be when the green of sum- 
 mer is in its full freshness, or when 
 
 "The woods of Autumn all around our vales 
 Have put their glory on." 
 Probably most of us have read, for it used to be in a New England school 
 book, of that journey of a day that was the picture of human life. And if 
 it were given to us to make the journey of a day that should be, not in 
 its events, but in its scenery, the picture of our lives, where should we 
 rather choose to make it than through the length of our own Berkshire? 
 What could we do better than to watch the rising sun from the top of Gray 
 Lock, and his setting from the Eagle's Nest? 
 
 It is in connection with such physical conditions, and such scenery as 
 this, aided by our New England institutions, that there has sprung up a 
 race of men of whom we are justly proud. 
 
 From the Berkshire Jubilee Sermon by Mark Hopkins, D. D., ISJf^. 
 
 HYMN. 
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee, 
 
 Our God, our fathers' God! 
 Thou has made thy children mighty 
 
 By the touch of the mountain sod. 
 Thou hast fixed our ark of refuge 
 
 Where the spoiler's foot ne'er trod, 
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee. 
 
 Our God, our fathers' God! 
 
We are watchers of a beacon 
 
 Whose lights must never die; 
 We are guardians of an altar 
 
 'Midst the silence of the sky; 
 The rocks yield founts of courage 
 
 Struck forth as by the rod — 
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee, 
 
 Our God, our fathers' God! 
 
 For the dark, resounding heavens, 
 
 Where thy still small voice is heard; 
 For the strong pines of the forests, 
 
 That by thy breath are stirred; 
 For the storms, on whose free pinions 
 
 Thy spirit walks abroad — 
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee, 
 
 Our God, our fathers' God! 
 
 For the shadow of thy presence, 
 
 Round our camp of rock out-spread; 
 For the stern defiles of battle, 
 
 Bearing record of our dead; 
 For the snows, and for the torrents. 
 
 For the free heart's burial sod, 
 For the strength of the hills we bless thee, 
 
 Our God, our fathers' God! 
 
 Written by Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans. Selected for singing at 
 the Berkshire JuMlee, 1S44- 
 
 II. 
 
 WATERS. 
 
 The peculiar shapes of the mountain ranges of Berkshire create 
 many different watersheds. The branches of the two most impor- 
 tant rivers in the county, the Housatonic and the Hoosac, have their 
 sources very near together. The Housatonic flows south into Long 
 Island Sound, while the Hoosac flows northwest into the Hudson. 
 
The Housatonic River is formed by two principal branches 
 wliich unite in I'ittsticld about a mile southeast of the Park. The 
 eastern branch is formed by the coming- together of many rivulets 
 from the hills of Windsor, Peru, Hinsdale, and Washington. It 
 takes a southwesterly course thru Dalton and the eastern part of 
 Pittsfield until it joins the western branch. The fountain head of 
 the western branch is near the southern border of New Ashford, 
 and within a few feet of the eastern branch of the Green River 
 which flows into the Hoosac at Williamstown. The Housatonic is 
 at first a small stream and runs thru Lanesboro into Pontoosuc 
 Lake. It tiows out of the lake over a dam about sixteen feet high 
 and takes a southerly course thru Pittsfield. 
 
 Course.— From the junction of its eastern and western branches 
 in Pittsfield. the river flows southerly thru the eastern part of Lenox, 
 thru Lee and Stockbridge, and along the western base of Monument 
 Mountain. From Great Harrington, it takes a slow, winding course 
 thru Shefiield and on into Connecticut, finally emptying into Long 
 Island Sound. 
 
 Tributaries.- — The Housatonic River winds thru a course of 
 perhaps seventy miles before it leaves the county. Along this course 
 it receives the waters of many streams from the mountains and from 
 the numerous lakes. 
 
 The most important of its tributaries are L^nkamet Brook, join- 
 ing it at Coltsville ; Sackett Brook, flowing thru Washington ; Wil- 
 liams River, at Great Barrington ; Green River, between Great Bar- 
 rington and Sheffield ; and Mill River, joining it in Sheffield near 
 the Connecticut line. Green River gets its name from the color of 
 its waters. The following beautiful poem about this river was 
 written by William Cullen Bryant when he was a lawyer in Great 
 Barrington. 
 
 GREEN RIVER. 
 
 When breezes are soft and skies are fair, 
 I steal an hour from study and care. 
 And hie me away to the woodland scene, 
 Where wanders the stream with waters of green, 
 
A VISTA ON THE GREEN RIVER. 
 
 As if the bright fringe of herbs on its brink 
 Had given their stain to the waves they drink; 
 And they, whose meadows it murmurs through, 
 Have named the stream from its own fair hue. 
 
 Yet pure its waters— its shallows are bright 
 With colored pebbles and sparkles of light. 
 And clear the depths where its eddies play, 
 And dimples deepen and whirl away, 
 And the plane-tree's speckled arms o'ershoot 
 The swifter current that mines its root, 
 Through whose shifting leaves, as you walk the hill, 
 The quivering glimmer of sun and rill 
 With a sudden flash on the eye is thrown, 
 Like the ray that streams from the diamond-stone. 
 Oh, loveliest there the spring days come, 
 With blossoms, and birds, and wild-bees' hum; 
 The flowers of summer are fairest there, 
 And freshest the breath of summer air; 
 And sweetest the golden autumn day 
 In silence and sunshine glides away. 
 
 Yet fair thou art, thou shunnest to glide. 
 Beautiful stream! by the village side; 
 But windest away from haunts of men. 
 
9 
 
 To quiet valley and shaded glen; 
 And forest, and meadow, and slope of hill, 
 Around thee, are lonely, lovely, and still, 
 Lonely — isave when, by thy rippling tides, 
 From thicket to thicket the angler glides; 
 Or the simpler comes, with basket and book 
 For herbs of power on thy banks to look; 
 Or haply, some idle dreamer, like me. 
 To wander, and muse, and gaze on thee. 
 Still — save the chirp of birds that feed 
 On the river cherry and seedy reed, 
 And thy own wild music gushing out 
 With mellow murmur of fairy shout. 
 From dawn to the blush of another day, 
 Like traveller singing along his way. 
 
 That fairy music I never hear, 
 Nor gaze on those waters so green and clear. 
 And mark them winding away from sight. 
 Darkened with shade or flashing with light. 
 While o'er them the vine to its thicket clings. 
 And the zephyr stoops to freshen his wings. 
 But I wish that fate had left me free 
 To wander these quiet haunts with thee. 
 Till the eating cares of earth should depart. 
 And the peace of the scene pass into my heart; 
 And I envy thy stream as it glides along 
 Through its beautiful banks in a trance of song. 
 
 Though forced to drudge for the dregs of men, 
 And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen, 
 And mingle among the jostling crowd. 
 Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud — 
 I often come to this quiet place. 
 To breathe the airs that ruffle thy face, 
 And gaze upon thee in silent dream, 
 For in thy lonely and lovely stream 
 An image of that calm life appears 
 That won my heart in my greener years. 
 
 In Pittsfield the Housatonic drains Pontoosuc, Onota, Rich- 
 mond, Silver, and Morewood lakes. In Stockbridge it drains Stock- 
 bridge Bowl. In Lenox. Lee. and the southern part of the county 
 it drains many small ponds. 
 
 Falls.' — The current of the Housatonic is more rai)id in some 
 
10 
 
 A VIEW OF WAHCONAH FALLS.* 
 
 places than in others, because of the difference in the slope of the 
 land. The branches coming thru Dalton are largely a succession of 
 waterfalls and rapids, while the one flowing thru Lanesboro is a 
 meadow brook. From Pontoosuc Lake there is for about three 
 miles a succession of dams, built for manufacturing purposes. From 
 just above Lenox Furnace a succession of waterfalls coniinues thru 
 Lee, Stockbridge, and Great Harrington, and affords water power 
 for many manufacturing establishments. 
 
 Use. — In its course thru Berkshire County, the Housatonic 
 River, tho not large and deep enough for navigacion, is an exceed- 
 ingly important stream. It adds much to the prosperity of the 
 people living along its course. 
 
 * On the Wahconah Brook almost near the Dalton line and in fact .just a trifle in the lat- 
 tertown . . . The stream has been constantly s-ninins' an impetus in its descent, now 
 flowing through the meadow or pastui'e. leisurely, and, ajiain. maddened and hurried, running 
 quite rapidly. It is a succession of cascades, until at this point hemmed in by rocks and stones 
 of quite large size, the stream makes a leap of some eighty feet and lies for a time partially 
 calm in quite a deep pool in a basin below. . . The stream is named for the Indian 
 
 maiden Wahconah. the daughter of Miaheonio. the chief of the tribe residing in the valley 
 where now is Dalton. . . . The falls decided eventually the fate of this fair Indijin maiden, 
 giving her to the brave of her choice rather than to the rival who was ugly and painted.— 
 From "The Book of Berkshire." by Clark W. Bryan. 
 
11 
 
 The soil alono- its l)anks is rich and easily cultivated, yielding 
 ahundant crops. In some portions, particularly in the southern 
 part of the countv. the land is often overflowed hy the melting of 
 the snow in the spring, causing a great flood. This flood hrings 
 down rich earth from the fields above and scatters it on the lands 
 
 overflowed.' 
 
 The following stanzas arc selected from a poem entitled "I he 
 \-ision of the Flousatonic River," written by Dr. Oliver Wendell 
 
 Holmes :* 
 
 IMoniiment. M(inuineiit Muuntiiin. 
 
 A GLIMPSE OF THE HOUSATONIC IN STOCKBRIDGB. 
 (Looking toward the South.) 
 
 * Long aso when the Honsatonic wound its sinuous way through an almost unbroken 
 and not altogether peaceful forest, the great student of man's will. Jonathan Edwards, recog- 
 nized its beauty, and. doubtless, resfngnow and then at Stockbridge. strolled across 
 
 the street to enjoy it. and be soothed by the -warbling tone ' of its rippling waters. Since 
 that great thinker bade it adieu, other great thinkers of thoughts far otl>er than h.s, but loving 
 it as he did, have celebrated it in prose and verse until now it is well-nigh the most classic of 
 American streams. Among those who have contributed to it. fame, most of them having 
 either permanent or temporary homes near its banks, are Catherine Sedgwick. W illuuii ullen 
 Bryant David Dudley Field. Herman Melville. Henry Ward Beecher. Natlianiel IlaNvthorne. 
 Fanny Kemble, Lydia Huntly Sigourney. Henry W. Longfellow, and Dr. William Allen, be- 
 sides scores of minor writers Its most marked tribute from Dr. Holmes' pen is The \ ision 
 of the Housatonic River. "-/"mm 'The Poet Among the Hills." by J. E. A. bmith. 
 
12 
 
 These are the pleasant Berkshire hills, 
 
 Bach with its leafy crown; 
 Hark! from their sides a thousand rills 
 
 Come singing sweetly down. 
 
 A thousand rills; they leap and shine, 
 Strained through the mossy nooks, 
 
 Till, clasped in many a gathering twine. 
 They swell a hundred brooks. 
 
 A hundred brooks, and still they run 
 With ripple, shade, and gleam, 
 
 Till clustering all their braids in one, 
 They flow a single stream. 
 
 A bracelet, spun from mountain mist, 
 
 A silvery sash unwound, 
 With ox-bow curve and sinuous twist. 
 
 It writhes to reach the "Sound." 
 
 Float we the grassy banks between; 
 
 Without an oar we glide; 
 The meadows, sheets of living green. 
 
 Unroll on either side. 
 
 And daisies strew the banks along. 
 
 And yellow kingcups shine. 
 With cowslips and a primrose throng, 
 
 And humble celandine. 
 
 1: 4> « 4> « * 
 
 Look on the forest's ancient kings. 
 
 The hemlock's towering pride; 
 Yon trunk had twice a hundred rings 
 
 And fell before it died. 
 ****** 
 The lily with the sprinkled dots, 
 
 Brands of the noontide beam; 
 The cardinal and the blood-red spots — 
 
 Its double in the stream. 
 
 As if some wounded eagle's breast 
 Slow throbbing o'er the plain, 
 
 Had left its airy path impressed 
 In drops of scarlet rain. 
 
13 
 
 And hark! and hark! the woodland rings; 
 
 There thrilled the thrush's soul; 
 And look! and look! those lightning wings — 
 
 The fire-plumed oriole! 
 
 Above the hen-hawk swims and swoops, 
 
 Flung from the bright blue sky; 
 Below the robin hops, and whoops 
 
 His little Indian cry. 
 * • ♦ * ♦ 
 Our children know each wild-wood smell, 
 
 The bayberry and the fern; 
 The man who does not' know them well, 
 
 Is all too old to learn. 
 
 The Hoosac, tho not as large as the Housatonic, is still of great 
 importance. 
 
 Source and Course It has a northerly and northwesterly 
 
 course. The main branch rises in the southeastern part of Lanes- 
 boro and flows thru Cheshire, Adams, and North Adams. Here it 
 turns to the west, passing along the north side of the Greylock group 
 of mountains into Williamstown and then to Vermont. At North 
 Adams it is joined by a northern branch which rises in Vermont. 
 The Hoosac receives the waters of various streams coming from 
 Cheshire, Hancock, and Williamstown. 
 
 Use.— The Hoosac River with all its branches is subject to a 
 sudden rise of water, as its volume is sometimes greatly increased 
 by rains and the melting of snow from the neighboring hills and 
 mountains. 
 
 It is an important stream because the swiftness of its current 
 makes it valuable for turning the machinery of mills. 
 
 Deerfield River. — In the northeast corner of the county the 
 brooks flow into the Deerfield River. This passes for several miles 
 along the northeast boundary of the county and forms the very wind- 
 ing border of the town of Florida. Flowing thru a very hilly and 
 mountainous section, where the hills appear piled together in the 
 greatest confusion, it is a wild and rapid stream. The ice frozen 
 upon its rocks in winter is very rarely broken up till spring. The 
 
14 
 
 breaking up of the river is a grand sight. By the melting of the 
 snow on the mountains the water is raised several feet before the ice 
 is sufficiently loosened to be borne away by the current. Rocks 
 weighing tons are sometimes raised up by the masses of ice and 
 borne along the stream. 
 
 The Westfield River rises in Savoy and receives branches from 
 Windsor, Peru, Washington, and Becket. A house in the town of 
 Bern is said to be so exactly on one of the summits that the drops of 
 rain which fall upon one side of its roof contribute water to the 
 Westfield River, and those on the other side to the Housatonic. In 
 tlie lower part of its course the Westfield River is called the Aga- 
 wam. It empties into the Connecticut River at Springfield. 
 
 Trace up thy current, Deerfleld, to its source, 
 And, Westfield, thine, — by smoke-horse travers'd now, — 
 
 By many an arch bestrided in its course; — 
 Your springs well forth from Berkshire's wood-crown'd brow. 
 
 Then Hoosuc westward takes his joyful way, 
 
 To mingle with broad Hudson's noble tide; 
 While southward, where the ocean monsters play. 
 
 Flows Housatunnuk, river of our pride. 
 
 From Dr. William Allen's Berkshire Jubilee Poem, 184-'h 
 
 The Farmington River rises in Becket and flows southeasterlv 
 thru Otis and along the eastern boundary of Sandisfield. After 
 leaving Massachusetts, it flows thru the northern part of the state of 
 Connecticut, and empties into the Connecticut River about five miles 
 north of Hartford. 
 
 Lalces. — Berkshire is a lake country. It is said that within its 
 borders there are fifty or sixty natural lakes. Most of these are in 
 the southern half of the county. There are, also, twenty-five or 
 more artificial reservoirs. 
 
 Many of the lakes are of considerable area. Some of moderate 
 size, like Lake Ashley in Washington and Berry Pond in Hancock, 
 lie upon the mountain tops and are fed almost entirely by springs. 
 Several mountain lakes are of great value in supplying water to the 
 growing towns below them. The drinking water is everywhere 
 pure. 
 
15 
 
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16 
 
 The towns having the greatest number of lakes and ponds are 
 Pittsfield, Stockbridge, and Otis, each of which has five, wholly or 
 partly within its limits. 
 
 Many of the lakes are gems in the scenery of the county. 
 Among those most noted for their beauty are Onota Lake, in Pitts- 
 field ; Pontoosuc Lake, in Pittsfield and Lanesboro ; Lake Mahkee- 
 nac (Stockbridge Bowl) in Stockbridge; and Lake Buel, in Mon- 
 terey and New Marlboro. 
 
 THE STOCKBRIDGE BOWL. 
 
 The Stockbridge Bowl! — Hast ever seen 
 
 How sweetly pure and bright, 
 Its foot of stone, and rim of green 
 
 Attracts the traveller's sight? — 
 High set among the breezy hills 
 
 Where spotless marble glows, 
 It takes the tribute of the rills 
 
 DistiU'd from mountain snows. 
 
 * You've seen, perchance, the classic vase 
 
 At Adrian's villa* found. 
 The grape-vines that its handles chase, 
 
 And twine its rim around. 
 But thousands such as that which boasts 
 
 The Roman's name to keep, 
 Might in this Stockbridge Bowl be lost 
 
 Like pebbles in the deep. 
 
 It yields no sparkling draughts of fire 
 
 To mock the madden'd brain, 
 As that which warm'd Anacreon's t lyre 
 
 Amid the Tean + plain — 
 But freely, with a right good will 
 
 Imparts its fountain store, 
 Whose heaven-replenished crystal still 
 
 Can wearied toil restore. 
 
 The Indian hunter knew its power, 
 
 And oft its praises spoke, 
 Long ere the white man's stranger-plow 
 
 These western valleys broke; 
 
 * A magnificent country residence at Tivoli. near Rome, in Italy, built by the Roman 
 emperor Adrian, or Hadrian. 
 
 t A poet of ancient (Greece. 
 
 tTean refers to the city of Teos, where Anacreon was born. 
 
17 
 
 The panting deer, that wild with pain 
 
 From his pursuers stole, 
 Inhaled new life to every vein 
 From this same Stockbridge Bowl. 
 
 And many a son of Berkshire skies, 
 
 Those men of nohle birth. 
 Though now, perchance, their roofs may rise 
 
 In far, or foreign earth — 
 Shall on this well remembered vase 
 
 With thrilling bosom gaze. 
 And o'er its mirror'd surface trace 
 
 The joys of earlier days. 
 
 But one, that with a spirit-glance 
 
 Hath moved her country's heart, 
 And bade, from dim oblivion's trance 
 
 Poor Magawiska* start, 
 Hath won a fame, whose blossoms rare 
 
 Shall fear no blighting sky, 
 Whose lustrous leaf be fresh and fair, 
 
 When Stockbridge Bowl is dry, 
 
 Mrs. Sigoumey. 
 
 This general view of the streams and ponds shows that the 
 county is well watered. It has many excellent sites for factories 
 and very valuable water power. 
 
 During the winter, sufficient ice is cut from the many lakes to 
 supply the county. Trout, pickerel, black bass, perch, eels and 
 many other kinds of fish are taken from the streams and lakes. 
 
 ♦The Indian stranger was tall for her years, which did not exceed fifteen. Her form 
 was slender, flexible, and graceful; and there was a freedom and loftiness in her movement 
 which, though tempered with modesty, expressed a consciou.sness of high birth. Her face, 
 alth(jugh marked by the peculiarities of her race, was beautiful even to a European eye. Her 
 features were regular, and her teeth white as pearls ; but there must be something beyond 
 symmetry of feature to fix the attention, and it was an expression of dignity, thoughtfulness 
 and deep dejection that made the eye linger on Magawiska's face, as if it were perusing there 
 the legible record of her birth and wrongs. Her hair, contrary to the fashion of the Massa- 
 chusetts Indians, was parted on her forehead, braided, and confined to her head by a band of 
 small feathers, .jet black, and interwoven, and attached at equal distances by rings of polished 
 bone. She wore a waistcoat of deerskin, fastened at the throat by a richly-wrought collar 
 Her arms, a model for sculpture, were bare. A mantle of purple cloth hung gracefully from 
 her shoulders, and was confined at the waist by a broad band ornamented with rude hiero- 
 glyphics. The mantle, and her strait short petticoat, or kilt, of the same rare and costly 
 material, had been obtained, probably, from the English traders. Stockings were an unknown 
 luxury ; but leggins, similar to those worn by the ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court, were no 
 bad substitute. The moccasin, neatly fitted to a delicate foot and ankle, and tastefully or. 
 namented with bead-work, completed the apparel of this daughter of a chieftain.— i^'rofw 
 "Hope Letlie; or Early Times in T/ie Massachusetts.'' by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. 
 
IS 
 
 III. 
 
 CLIMATE. 
 
 For two or three months a daily record of weather conditions 
 should be kept on the blackboard by the school and also by each 
 pupil for himself. The following is suggested as a convenient form 
 for such record. The record should be written at the same hour 
 each morning. 
 
 DAILY WEATHER RECORD. 
 
 Year, 
 
 Month, 
 
 Day of week. 
 
 Day of month. 
 
 Sunrise 
 Sunset. 
 
 Phases 
 
 of 
 Moon. 
 
 Temper- 
 ature. 
 
 Clouds 
 
 or 
 Clear. 
 
 Rain 
 or 
 
 Snow. 
 
 Frost 
 
 or 
 Dew. 
 
 Wind. 
 
 Remark.s. 
 
 (If the conditions named at the head of the columns— dew. frost, rain, snow— do not ex- 
 ist, the space may be filled with a straight line or a * may be inserted. 
 
 The phases of the moon are shown by the words New, First Quarter, Full, Last Quarter. 
 
 The time when the sun rises and sets and the changes of the moon can be found in 
 an almanac. 
 
 Make notes of great changes in weather during the day. It may be stormy in th* 
 morning and clear in the afternoon, or it may grow colder or warmer. If there is any 
 great storm or anything unusual about the weather, meniion it on the record.) 
 
 Sun. — Its use. Its daily course. Does the sun appear above 
 the horizon at the same hour every day ? Does it disappear below the 
 horizon at the same hour every day? About what is its path thru 
 the sky? Is its path the same in different seasons of the year? 
 What happens to the length of the days as we approach December, 
 and afterwards as we approach June ? Notice whether the sun rises 
 each morning and sets each evening. Does it rise and set at the 
 same place in different seasons? Notice some tree, stick, peak, or 
 whatever may be most convenient, near which the sun rises or sets, 
 and see if it alw.ays rises and sets on the same side of the object 
 you have chosen and at the same distance from it. 
 
 The Moon. — Notice the shape of the moon and its position in 
 the sky on different evenings. Does it appear every evening? Does 
 
19 
 
 It appear each evening at the same time? The hght which the 
 moon gives is reflected from the sun. 
 
 The Thermometer. — Notice the parts, and the mercury in the 
 tube. Notice its position. Put the thermometer in warm water. 
 What happens to the mercury? What effect has cold upon it? 
 
 Clouds. — \'apor constantly passing into the sky meets with 
 cold air or wind and is condensed into water-dust. We can see it 
 and call it a cloud. When this same thing happens to vapor near 
 the surface of the earth, we call it a fog. If we can feel the water- 
 dust we call it ]nist. Notice the shapes of the clouds and how they 
 move thru the sky. See if you can draw some of the forms they 
 take. W^atch their colors in the morning and at evening. Perhaps 
 you can find some pictures of the sky and try to color the clouds as 
 you have seen them. 
 
 September 1st, 1838. — Last evening, during a walk, Graylock and the 
 whole of Saddleback were at first imbued with a mild, half-sunshiny tinge, 
 then grew almost black, — a huge, dark mass lying on the back of the earth 
 and encumbering it. Stretching up from behind the black mountain, over 
 a third or more of the sky, there was a heavy, sombre blue heap or ledge 
 of clouds, looking almost as solid as rocks. . . . The mass, as a whole, 
 seemed as solid, bulky, and ponderous in the cloud-world as the mountain 
 was on earth. The mountain and cloud together had an indescribably 
 stern and majestic aspect. Beneath this heavy cloud, there was a fleet or 
 flock of light, vapory mists, flitting in middle air; and these were tinted, 
 from the vanished sun, with the most gorgeous and living purple that can 
 be conceived, — a fringe upon the stern blue. In the opposite quarter of 
 the heavens, a rose-light was reflected, whence I know not, which colored 
 the clouds around the moon, then well above the horizon. — From Haw- 
 thorne's "American Note-Books." 
 
 Rain, Snow, and Hail. — Water-dust in the sky becomes heavy 
 and falls to the earth as rain. Rain is water falling in drops from 
 the sky to the surface of the earth. If a cold wave meets a cloud, 
 the cold freezes the water-dust, forming flakes of snow. Hail is 
 frozen rain. 
 
 Dew and Frost.— On some mornings the ground is wet with 
 dew. The ground cools at night and vapor near the cooled ground 
 condenses and becomes dew. Frost is frozen dew. 
 
20 
 
 Last night the thermometer sank nearly to rezo, and see what business 
 Nature has had on hand! Every pane of glass is etched and figured as 
 never Moorish artist decorated Alhambra.* Will you pass it unexamined, 
 S'mply because it cost you nothing — because it is so common — because it 
 is. this morning, the property of so many people — 'because it was wrought 
 by Nature and not by man? Do not do so. Learn rather to enjoy it 
 for its own elegance, and for God's sake, who gave to frosts such wondrous 
 artist tendencies. 
 
 The children are wiser than their elders. They are already at the 
 window interpreting these mysterious pictures. One has discovered a 
 silent, solitary lake, extremely beautiful, among stately white cliffs. 
 Another points out a forest of white fir trees and pines, growing in 
 rugged grandeur. There are in succession discovered mountains, valleys, 
 cities of glorious structures, a little confused in their outline by distance. 
 There are various beasts, too; — here a bear coming down to the water; 
 birds in flocks, or sitting voiceless and solitary. There are rivers flow- 
 ing through plains; and elephants, and buffaloes, and herds of cattle. 
 Tnpre are dogs and serpents, trees and horses, ships and men. — From 
 "Frost in the Window," one of the "Star Papers" by Henry Ward 
 Beecher. 
 
 Amount of Rainfall. — To tell how much rain falls, put out a 
 glass or a pail with vertical sides, and let it stand in an open place 
 where the rain or the snow can fall into it as it drops from the sky. 
 Then measure the depth of the rain in the glass or the pail. The 
 snow is allowed to melt and then the depth of the water is measured. t 
 
 Lenox, February 12th, 1851. — A walk across the lake (Mahkeenac, or 
 Stockbridge Bowl) with Una. A heavy rain, some days ago, has melted 
 a good deal of the snow on the intervening descent between our house and 
 the lake; but many drifts, depths, and levels yet remain; and there is a 
 frozen crust, sufficient to bear a man's weight, and very slippery. Adown 
 the slopes there are tiny rivulets, which exist only for the winter. Bare, 
 brown spaces of grass here and there, but still so infrequent as only to 
 diversify the scene a little. In the woods, rocks emerging, and, where 
 
 * The palace of the Moorish kings at Granada in Spain. 
 
 t At the City Hall in Pittsfleld, the Clerk of the Board of Public Works keeps a record every 
 day in the year of the rainfall and of the temperature. The average of each for each month 
 for the five years, 1895-1900, was as follows : 
 
 Rainfall in inches. 
 January, 3 03 
 
 February, 2.61 
 
 March, 3 42 
 
 April, 2.27 
 
 May, 2.58 
 
 June. 3.49 
 
 Average yearly rainfall for the five years, 45.79 inches. 
 
 Average yearly temperature for the five years, 45.43 degrees. 
 
 The average rainfall given for July is larger than it is likely to be in most years, be- 
 cause in 1897, the rain falling in July amounted to 12.19 inches. 
 
 nperature. 
 
 Rainfall 
 
 in inches. 
 
 Temperature. 
 
 20.97 
 
 July, 
 
 5.39 
 
 69.10 
 
 21.13 
 
 August. 
 
 .3.79 
 
 66.49 
 
 29 72 
 
 September, 
 
 3 31 
 
 59.40 
 
 4a. 86 
 
 October, 
 
 2 69 
 
 48 00 
 
 .56.77 
 
 November, 
 
 3 45 
 
 37.95 
 
 64.90 
 
 December, 
 
 2.59 
 
 26.85 
 
21 
 
 there is a slope immediately towards the lake, the snow is pretty much 
 gone, and we see partridge-berries frozen, and outer shells of walnuts, and 
 chestnut burrs, heaped or scattered among the roots of the trees. The 
 walnut-husks mark the place where the boys, after nutting, sat down to 
 clear the walnuts of their outer shell. The various species of pine look 
 exceedingly brown just now, — less beautiful than those trees which shed 
 their leaves. An oak-tree, with almost all its brown foliage still rustling 
 on it. We clamber down the bank, and step upon the frozen lake. It was 
 snow-covered for a considerable time; but the rain overspread it with a 
 surface of, water, or imperfectly melted snow, which is now hard frozen 
 again; and the thermometer having been frequently below zero, I suppose 
 the ice may be four or five feet thick. Frequently there are great cracks 
 across it, caused, I suppose, by the air beneath, and giving an idea of 
 greater firmness than if there were no cracks; round holes, which have 
 been hewn in the marble pavement by fishermen, and are now frozen 
 over again, looking darker than the rest of the surface; spaces where the 
 snow was. more imperfectly dissolved than elsewhere; little crackling 
 spots, where a thin surface of ice, over the real mass, crumples beneath 
 one's foot; the track of a line of footsteps, most of them vaguely formed, 
 but some quite perfectly, where a person passed across the lake while its 
 surface was in a state of slush, but which are now as hard as adamant, 
 and remind one of the traces discovered by geologists in rocks that hard- 
 ened thousands of ages ago. It seems as if the person passed when the 
 lake was in an intermediate state between ice and water. In one spot 
 some pine boughs, which somebody had cut and heaped there for an un- 
 known purpose. In the center of the lake, we see the surrounding hills 
 in a new attitude, this being a basin in the midst of them. Where they 
 are covered with wood, the aspect is gray or black; then there are bare 
 slopes of broken snow, the outlines and indentations being much more 
 hardly and firmly deiined than in summer. We went southward across 
 the lake, directly towards Monumient Mountain, which reposes, as I said, 
 like a headless sphinx. Its prominences, projections, and roughnesses 
 are very evident; and it does not present a smooth and placid front, as 
 when the grass is green and the trees in leaf. At one end, too, we are 
 sensible of precipitous descents, black and shaggy with the forest that 
 is likely always to grow there; and, in one streak, a headlong sweep 
 downward of snow. We just set our feet on the farther shore, and then 
 immediately returned, facing the northwest-wind, which blew very sharply 
 against us. 
 
 After landing, we came homeward, tracing up the little brook so far 
 as it lay in our course. It was considerably swollen, and rushed fleetly 
 on its course between overhanging banks of snow and ice, from which 
 depended adamantine icicles. The little waterfalls with which we had 
 impeded it in the summer and autumn could do no more than form a 
 
22 
 
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 Sf) 
 
 ^ 
 
 C3 
 
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 /sj 
 
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 C-( 
 
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 CAJ 
 
 
 
 ^.r 
 
 
 ja 
 
 
 bfl 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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23 
 
 large ripple, so much greater was the volume of water. In some places 
 the crust of frozen snow made a bridge quite over the brook; so that you 
 only knew it was there by its brawling sound beneath. 
 
 The sunsets of winter are incomparably splendid, and when the 
 ground is covered with snow, no brilliancy of tint expressible by words 
 can come within an infinite distance of the effect. Our southern view at 
 that time, with the clouds and atmospherical hues, is quite indescribable 
 and unimaginable; and the various distances of the hills which lie be- 
 tween us and the remote dome of Taconic are brought out with an ac- 
 curacy unattainable in summer. The transparency of the air at this sea- 
 son has the effect of a telescope in bringing objects apparently near, while 
 it leaves the scene all its breadth. The sunset sky, amidst its splendor, 
 has a softness and delicacy that impart themselves to a white marble 
 world. — From Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''American Note-Books." 
 
 To be cloud-blind seems as bad as to be colour-blind; and not to be 
 moved by the aspect of the sky is as unfortunate as to know no difference 
 between the smile and the frown on the face of a human being. 
 
 To-day. for instance, we have had a fine succession of cloud-effects, 
 whose changes have been like the moods of a friend. The morning opened 
 with lowering clouds, low, dark, in hurried movement, pouring heavy 
 showers in copious bursts with each fresh squall. It was one of those 
 rains which had no threat of thunderbolt or of tornado, and all the cloud 
 aspects were friendly and reassuring. The rain drew a steel-grey curtain 
 between the eye and the landscape, which added a distinct charm to the 
 whole circle of scenery. All the face of the sky seemed to say to the be- 
 leaguered human beings in the house: "Stay at home and be happy; read, 
 chat, sing, mend stockings, play games, while the earth soaks in refresh- 
 ment and nutrition from the clouds." There is a sense of the comfort 
 of home which one might call storm-begotten. I fancy most people learn 
 to relish it thoroughly. It puts a premium upon all the attractions of the 
 sheltering roof and the cheerful fireside. Yet the clouds have no menace 
 of harm to the earth. They only seem to deprecate going out of doors. 
 They encourage home-staying. 
 
 But soon after breakfast, . . . there came great rifts in the clouds, 
 through which the deep blue of a clear upper stratum gleamed brightly 
 and hopefully. The rents grew larger, the sunlight came in more frequent 
 bursts, the tattered edges of the storm-cloud hung darkly in the east, 
 while westward the blue was bright and cheery with the promise of 
 clear weather. I could not help noting, as I studied the retreating wrack, 
 how much a certain blue patch in the cloud-bank resembled the angry 
 glow of an inflammation. It was like a bad symptom, in this instance 
 just beginning to disappear. 
 
 The early afternoon brought a new phase of cloud-scenery. The soft 
 cumulus clouds which had been hardly more than shreds and patches all 
 
24 
 
 the morning massed and moulded themselves into great bastions and bul- 
 warks of brassy-white, deepening into a copper-colour as the hours went 
 by. Such a sign is seldom unfulfilled, and it was no surprise to hear be- 
 fore long the boom and rumble of distant thunder. The squall gathered 
 squarely in the west and advanced directly over our territory. It was 
 one of those sharp, decided, business-like squalls, which drops a few bolts 
 from its advancing edge, and one or two in retreat, and then is gone; like 
 the light batteries in the rear guard of a retreating army, whose vigorous 
 fire holds the enemy in check and gives time for their own swift with- 
 drawal. 
 
 Of course the sunset of such a day was full of quiet beauty. There 
 were no such gorgeous hues, such lavishness of colour, crimsons, purples, 
 and golds, as herald the approaching gale. But the west glowed with 
 warm colour which tinted the few gathered clouds and rimmed them with 
 gold, and the glory lingered, and slowly faded, long after the evening star 
 had flamed out, and the moon had risen in the east. — From ''Nature 
 Studies in Berkshire," by John Coleman Adams. 
 
 IV. 
 
 MINERALS. 
 
 The Chief Mineral Deposits of Berkshire County are limestone, 
 marble, quartz, and iron ore. 
 
 Limestone. — The limestone bed which extends from Long Is- 
 land Sound thru Vermont is practically continuous thru the western 
 side of the Housatonic Valley. 
 
 To have correct views of the region ... it is necessary to drop 
 out of sight all state boundary lines — those of Vermont, New York and 
 Connecticut. Then your border mountains are no longer the barrier moun- 
 tains of Berkshire; but a ridge, like Tom Ball, Lenox Mountain, South 
 Mountain and others east of it, between ranges of limestone, and the 
 Taconic ridges and limestone valleys are seen to continue on with their 
 Berkshire features, northward through much of Vermont, and south- 
 ward into Connecticut and southeastern New York. A general map of the 
 county from northern Vermont, southward and south westward to Penn- 
 sylvania, having its limestone areas colored, shows to the eye that the 
 system in Berkshire rocks is part of the system in the rocks of eastern 
 North America. — Froyn an address on "Berkshire Geology" delivered be- 
 fore the Berkshire Historical and Scientific Society, by Prof. Javies D. 
 Dana, of Yale College, 1885. 
 
 The dark blue limestone of which the Athenaeum is built was 
 found in Great Barring-ton. One of the uses of limestone is to make 
 quicklime. 
 
25 
 
 BERKSHIRE COUNTY COURT HOUSE. PITTSFIELD ATHENAEUM. 
 
 Marble. — Thru this region there are many valuable beds of 
 marble. Marble is a fine quality of limestone which will take a 
 good polish. It is generally white or lightly clouded, but often 
 blue, gray, or dove-colored. The three last mentioned varieties, as 
 found in Berkshire, do not take as high a polish as the first two, 
 and so are not considered true marble ; but they are very highly 
 prized as building stones in this region. 
 
 The white marble of Berkshire is in demand in the great mar- 
 kets and has long stood foremost among the marbles of this coun- 
 try. Marble is not, however, as much used for building as formerly. 
 
 The white marble of which the Court House in Pittsfield was 
 built, and the dove-colored stone which forms its basement walls 
 are from a Sheffield quarry. This quarry also furnished the white 
 marble for the completion of the National Monument at Washing- 
 ton. 
 
 Long ago the material for the New York City Hall was taken 
 from a quarry at West Stockbridge. Lee furnished the marble used 
 in the extension of the Capitol at Washington and for the great 
 City Hall in Philadel])liia. The marble used in Girard College in 
 Fhiladeli)hia came from Egremont. 
 
26 
 
 On the eastern side of the valley marble crops out in several 
 towns from a bed not so wide as that on the west. It extends from 
 North Adams to New Marlboro. The white marble in this bed is 
 coarser and harder than that found in the western part of the county. 
 
 The Natural Bridge in the northern part of North Adams, is 
 one of the curiosities of Berkshire County. This was originally an 
 immense rock of the marble just mentioned. Hudson's Brook, 
 which joins the Hoosac River, has worn a channel for itself thru 
 this rock. 1 nis channel has been worn lower and lower until the 
 walls of the rock are sixty feet high in some places. The brook, 
 having cut thru this rock, has left the top of it to make the floor of 
 the bridge over the chasm. 
 
 THE NATURAL BRIDGE, NORTH ADAMS. 
 
 North Adams, Aug. 11th, 18JS. — Hudson's Cave* is formed by Hudson's 
 Brook. There is a natural arch of marble still in one part of it. The 
 cliffs are partly made verdant with green moss, chiefly gray with oxida- 
 tion ;t on some parts the white of the marble is seen; . . . there is 
 
 *The Natural Bridge. There is a cave near the top of the chasm. 
 + Combination with oxygen. 
 
27 
 
 naked sublimity seen through a good deal of clustering beauty. Above, 
 the birch, poplars, and pines grow on the utmost verge of the cliffs, which 
 jut far over, so that they are suspended in air; and whenever the sun- 
 shine finds its way into the depths of the chasm the branches wave 
 across it. There is a lightness, however, about their foliage, which 
 greatly relieves what would otherwise be a gloomy scene. After the 
 passage of the stream through the cliffs of marble, the cliffs separate on 
 either side, and leave it to flow onward; intercepting its passage, however, 
 by fragments of marble, some of them huge ones, which the cliffs have 
 flung down, thundering into the bed of the stream through numberless 
 ages. Doubtless some of these immense fragments had trees growing on 
 them, which have now mouldered away. Decaying trunks are heaped in 
 various parts of the gorge. The pieces of marble that are washed by the 
 water are of a snow-white, and partially covered with a bright green 
 water-moss, making a beautiful contrast. 
 
 Among the cliffs, strips of earth-beach extend downward, and trees 
 and large shrubs root themselves in that earth, thus further contrasting 
 the nakedness of the stone with their green foliage. But the immediate 
 part where the stream forces its winding passage through the rock is 
 stern, dark, and mysterious. . . . 
 
 The cave makes a fresh impression upon me every time I visit it, — 
 so deep, so irregular, so gloomy, so stern. ... I stand and look into 
 its depths at various points, and hear the roar of the stream re-echoing 
 up. It is like a heart that has been rent asunder by a torrent of passion. 
 — From Hawthorne's '"American Note-Books." 
 
 Quartz — A rock valued very hig^hly is the quartz which is 
 found thruout the entire length of the county. It is sometimes in 
 veins, sometimes in beds, often comprising the mass of high hills of 
 this locality. 
 
 There have been several attempts to extract gold in paying 
 quantities from the quartz rocks of this region. 
 
 A valuable variety of quartz rock found here is the fire 
 sionc used for the hearths of iron blast furnaces. A quarry in the 
 southeastern part of Great Barrington for many years furnished 
 hearths for furnaces in many parts of the United States. 
 
 All along the greater portion of the eastern slope of the Hoosac 
 range, still another form of quartz is found. It is compact and is 
 known as flint. 
 
 In the towns of Savoy, Cheshire, Lanesboro, and Washington 
 are found extensive beds of the purest zvhitc quarts sand very valu- 
 able for the manufacture of glass. For this purpose it is the finest 
 
28 
 
 and best in the world. These beds have been a source of much 
 wealth to the county. Very little glass is now manufactured here, 
 but thousands of tons of the sand are shipped every year to various 
 places where the other conditions for the manufacture of glass are 
 more favorable. 
 
 There is in many parts quartz rock or guartzyte, a kind of sandstone: 
 it is the material of the smooth-faced bowlders over the fields called 
 "hard heads." . . . This quartzyte in Berkshire is most common 
 along the ascent of the eastern plateau, but it also occurs in places over 
 its top, as in the town of Washington south of Ashley lake, the Pittsfield 
 reservoir lake . . . and also in the town of Savoy, a little west of 
 the village, nearly six miles from the Cheshire station. Much of the 
 quartzyte is very firm and solid; but in some localities as in Cheshire, 
 and less perfectly near Ashley lake, it is a loose sand, as loose and pure 
 as the sands of any seashore, or so soft as to be easily crushed to sand, 
 for these well-known localities of fine glass sand are localities of the 
 rock quartzyte. 
 
 This looseness of texture, at Cheshire and elsewhere, is, as I have 
 found, a result of decay, a result of the loss of one ingredient. The 
 quartzyte at such places contained disseminated grains of feldspar, and 
 the loss of the feldspar through infiltrating waters, has led to its falling 
 to sand. This is well shown at the principal quarry two miles south of 
 the Cheshire railroad station, for the waters running from the quarry 
 deposit kaolin along the bed of the little brook, and kaolin occurs in the 
 quarry in seams between quartzyte layers, and so penetrates some of the 
 thinner quartzyte layers that they are of no value for the sand. — From 
 "Berkshire Geology," hy Prof. James D. Dana. 
 
 Iron. — The early settlers in Berkshire found large quantities of 
 iron ore. From that time until a few years ago much iron was 
 manufactured in this region. A deposit of iron ore lies in the wes- 
 tern part of the county. Furnaces in Lanesboro, Richmond, Lenox, 
 and Lee were long a source of wealth to the county ; but most of 
 these furnaces have now ceased working, because iron can be taken 
 from the ore more cheaply in other places. 
 
 I come now to the question as to the origin of the Berkshire beds 
 of iron ore, remarkable for their purity and extent, which are found along 
 the margins of some of the limestone valleys; . . . 
 
 . . . All now admit that the ore is a secondary product; that is, 
 that it was formed through the oxidation of iron that originally made 
 part of minerals in the schist, or in the limestone, or else in both. The 
 ore is always very cavernous or loose in texture, . . . as if it had 
 
29 
 
 been deposited by waters in cavernous recesses; . . . water, not fire, 
 was a chief agent in its formation. 
 
 All the facts point to the conclusion that the iron has come chiefly 
 . . . from limestone which contained iron as one of its essential 
 constituents . , . the limestone will rust readily on exposure to air 
 and water. 
 
 The removal of the iron portion of a limestone loosens the texture 
 of the whole rock . . . The now loose-textured limestone is easily 
 dissolved away by percolating waters; and thus the oxide of iron, or ore, 
 is left by itself and a cavity made for its reception at the same time. 
 
 How did the iron get into the limestone? . . . Why is it distrib- 
 uted with so great irregularity, — here in broad patches, there in winding 
 courses abruptly, widening or narrowing, and so on? 
 
 If you accept of the view that the limestone was first made in fereat 
 horizontal beds in the pure waters of a Lower Silurian sea; that the 
 schist or slate was originally the sediment that in the following era was 
 deposited over the limestone; that during the epoch of transition be- 
 tween the two conditions great sea-border marshes might have existed, 
 receiving, here and there, like similar modem nxarshes, iron-bearing solu- 
 tions through the drainage of a bordering country, until ore deposits were 
 made, you may perhaps put together a theory that will account for the 
 introduction and the peculiar irregular distribution of the ore in the 
 limestone. — From Dana's "Berkshire G-eology." 
 
 Other Minerals. — Soapstone is found near Wahconah Falls on 
 the border between Dalton and Windsor. Mica and slate are found 
 in West Stockbridge. In New Marlboro a kind of clay very valu- 
 able for the manufacture of pottery is found in great abundance. It 
 is called kaolin. It is said to be largely used in the adulteration of 
 candy. 
 
 Kaolin is pure clay, the kind used for making porcelain. It is a com- 
 pound of silica, alumina and water; and has ordinarily been made from 
 the decomposition of feldspar. Feldspar affords on analysis silica, alumina 
 and potash. Kaolin is made from it by the action of waters which have 
 the power (because they contain some carbonic acid or some organic 
 acid) of removing the potash and leaving water in its place; hence the 
 action of waters infiltrating through the rock containing feldspar makes 
 kaolin out of the feldspar. The remarkable deposit of kaolin in southern 
 New Marlboro, has been made, I believe, from the decomposition of the 
 feldspar of a very feldspatic quartzyte, and the washing out of the clay 
 so made and its deposition by running water. — From Dana's "Berkshire 
 Geology.'' 
 
 Boulders. —The boulders found in Berkshire County are large 
 smoothly roundeci rocks brought from the northwest many years 
 
30 
 
 BALANCED ROCK. 
 
 ago by great moving masses of ice called glaciers. An enormous 
 boulder supported on a small rock and called Balanced Rock, is 
 found in the southwestern part of Lanesboro, and is one of the most 
 remarkable known. Thru Richmond there extends a remarkable 
 chain or line of boulders. 
 
 Eastern Berkshire, the plateau region, is covered generally with the 
 hard well-bedded crystalline rocks, called gneiss, and mica schist. By 
 well-bedded I mean lying in beds or layers, or having distinct strati- 
 fication. 
 
 Besides the common mica schist and gneiss of the eastern plateau 
 of Berkshire, there are other rocks which are, like those of the Adiron- 
 dacks, of undoubted Archaean* age. One Archaean area is situated about 
 seven miles east of Pittsfield, in a cut on the railroad, only a few yards 
 north of the Hinsdale depot, where a crystalline limestone intersects a 
 granite-like rock ... It is a locality well worth exploring, and it la 
 quite probable that the same rock may be found in some of the little 
 explored parts of Dalton. The long cut just south of the Washington 
 depot, is another Archaean locality, and so also a ridge west of the car- 
 riage road, less than a mile north of the depot. 
 
 4> * * * « 
 
 As you go westward in any part of Berkshire, the schists become 
 less and less coarse in texture; and at the western foot of the Taconic 
 * Th« Archaean rocks are the oldest rocks known, i. e. they were formed nearest to 
 the time when the earth had its beginning. 
 
31 
 
 range, they are sometimes but little more crystalline or glossy than 
 roofing slate. So it is also with the limestones, the coarsest crystalline 
 limestones and coarsest marbles are to the eastward; to the westward, 
 west of the Taconic range, they are gray and feebly crystalline. 
 This downward graduation in degree of crystallization, from east to west, 
 is, in a general way, true for all parts of the region from Vermont to 
 Connecticut. There is a similar downward graduation in going south to 
 north, but at a less rapid rate. 
 
 The Berkshire rocks have generally a high pitch or dip, often 50 
 degrees, sometimes 90 degrees, and are rarely horizontal . . . the 
 Taconic rocks are of one system, which means that they were originally 
 one continuous pile of horizontally bedded rocks; that they were up- 
 turned simultaneously and together placed in their present positions. 
 
 Another point to be noted is that the rocks are in a series of folds 
 or flexures; and that the north and south direction of the folds de- 
 termined the general north and south direction of the ridges and valleys. 
 
 The folds have an inclination to the westward ... In Monument 
 moi;ntain I think we have an example of a complete overturn. 
 
 The facts . . . are sufficient to prove that the limestone is the 
 underlying rock of the region; that it passes underneath the schist of 
 the Taconic range. 
 
 . . . All the limestone of the region belongs to one stratum; and 
 most, if not ail, of the schists and quartzyte of middle and western Berk- 
 shire to one overlying stratum or formation. 
 
 The speculating geologist would go further and say that when the 
 limestone and the overlying schist were in progress of formation, in 
 great horizontal strata, Western New England and Eastern New York 
 were together the area of a great sea, probably not a very deep sea; that 
 in this great continental sea, as now in the Florida seas and many parts 
 of the Pacific, limestone was made out of shells, corals, etc., as long as the 
 waters were pure from sediment. But that afterward, there was an era 
 of marine currents carrying sediments, or earth and sand; and that thus 
 a stratum of earthly material, perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 feet thick, was 
 formed over the limestone. As already explained, fossils in the Vermont 
 part of the limestone prove that these events occurred in Lower Silurian* 
 time. 
 
 But the above remarks do not cover eastern Berkshire. The quart- 
 zyte of this region is probably . . . older than limestone ... As 
 to the age of the gneisses, ... I have no definite opinion excepting 
 for those that are plainly Archaean . . . These Archaean areas were 
 
 ♦The "Lower Silurian" was a very early period in rock formation. 
 
32 
 
 probably islands in the continental sea when the limestone and over- 
 lying beds were in progress . . . 
 
 ***** 
 
 Why are the strata of limestone and of earthly sediments now in a 
 crystalline condition? Why are they bent up into great north and south 
 folds; and into folds having their tops pushed over westward? 
 
 This one fact appears to be certain that the folds — sometimes in half 
 a dozen parallel lines over the country — ^are evidence of pressure; not 
 of pressure from beneath, but of lateral pressure in the earth crust; 
 and facts indicate that the lateral pressure came from the eastward .' . , 
 
 It has been reported by the Director of the Geological survey of 
 Great Britain, that during some part of the Silurian era, in Northern 
 Scotland, a vast sheet of rock, chiefly gneiss in the more northern por- 
 tion, four hundred feet thick, was shoved westward horizontally for ten 
 miles at least, over the Lower Silurian rocks of the region; that this 
 stupendous movement took place over a breadth of country ninety miles 
 long from north to south. It was a marvelous effect to come from 
 such a cause — lateral pressure in the earth's crust. It is as if the gneiss 
 of the mountain plateau of all eastern Berkshire, or four hundred feet 
 in thickness of it, and also of forty miles north in Vermont, had been 
 shoved westward until its front edge lay over the Taconic range. — From 
 Dana's ''Berkshire Geology." 
 
 V. 
 PLANTS. 
 
 We love the stream, the lake, o'rhung with wood. 
 The fields of green and cool recess of grove; — 
 
 'Tis symbol-scene of purer, sweeter good, 
 Fore'er enjoyed in the high heavens above. 
 
 From Dr. Allen's Berkshire Jubilee Poem. 
 
 Some of the plants cultivated on the farms of Berkshire are 
 wheat, rye, oats, Indian corn, barley, buckwheat, peas, beans, 
 pumpkins, squashes, potatoes, turnips, beets, flax, tobacco, red and 
 white clover, and timothy, sometimes called herd's-grass. 
 
 Flax was raised quite extensively in former times, but is now 
 seldom seen. Of the grains raised Indian corn is important. The 
 cultivation of zvhcat and rye is growing less. There is still some 
 wheat raised, but most of the wheat flour is brought into the county 
 from the west. The potato forms an important article of food and 
 is raised in large quantities, being a safe and cheap crop. 
 
33 
 
 Of fruits, the chief is the apple. Some of the dififerent kinds 
 are the greening, Spitzenberg, Baldwin, russet, pippin, gilhflower, 
 and northern spy. The pear is quite common. The plum is also 
 raised but not so much as formerly on account of disease among the 
 plum trees. Altho the peach can be raised by great care, it is 
 found that the soil and climate are not favorable for its growth and 
 so it is seldom seen. There are some grapes. The quince is also 
 raised. 
 
 Lenox, October, iSJ//.— Grandest of all joy, highest in the scale of 
 rapture, the last thing talked of before sleep and the first thing remem- 
 bered in the morning, is the going out a-nutting. 0! the hunting of 
 little baskets, the irrepressible glee, as bags and big baskets . . . come 
 forth! Then the departure, the father or uncle climbing the tree — "O! 
 Low high!" — the shaking of limbs, the rattle of hundreds of chestnuts 
 which squirrels shall never see again, the eager picking up, the merry 
 ohs! and ouches! as nuts come plump down on their bare heads, the 
 growing heap, the approaching dinner by the brook, on leaves yellow as 
 gold, and in sunlight yellower still, the mysterious baskets to be opened, 
 the cold chicken, the bread slices — ah me! one would love to be twenty 
 boys, or a boy twenty times over, just to experience the simple, genuine, 
 full, unalloyed pleasure of children going with father and mother to the 
 woods "a-nutting!" — From "Mid-October Days," one of the "Star Papers," 
 by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 Trees. — The great beauty of the mountain scenery of Berkshire 
 is often remarked. The beauty of the foliage is partly due to the 
 many different kinds of shrubs and forest trees. Among these are 
 the oak, elm, pine , spruce, maple, poplar, chestnut, horse-chestnut, 
 walnut, butternut, beech, birch, cherry, hemlock, mountain-ash, 
 willow, and tamarack. The Lombardy poplar was formerly planted 
 as an ornamental tree. 
 
 Maple-sugar has been quite generally made from the sap of 
 the maple-tree. 
 
 You must have heard of the old Elm of Pittsfield Park. It has ita 
 place of fame among The Trees of America; and has had this many & 
 year. It is not long since it rose here, among the young green growth, 
 the scarred and seared veteran of centuries. Straight into the air it 
 sprang, one hundred and twenty-six feet; a tall grey pillar, bearing for 
 sole capital a few green branches, and a few withered, shattered and bare 
 limbs. From Greylock to Monument Mountain there was no inanimate 
 thing so revered and venerable. Nor had it grown thus without a story, 
 and one with which the stories of other, and human lives were closely 
 entwined. — From "Taghconic," by Joseph E. A. Smith. 
 
34 
 
 I delight in recalling the old scenes. Changed they must be; yet I 
 seem to be carried back to the broad street*, our usual drive on our way 
 from the "Four Corners" and "Canoe Meadows"! as my mother told me 
 they called it. It seems too bad to take away the town's charming char- 
 acteristics; but such a healthful, beautiful, central situation could not re- 
 sist its destiny; and you must have a mayor, aldermen, and common council. 
 But Greylock will remain, and you cannot turn the course of the Housa- 
 tonic. I cannot believe that it is thirty years since I said "Good bye," 
 expecting to return the next season. As we passed the gate under the 
 maple which may stand there now we turned and looked at the house 
 And at the Great Pine which stood — and I hope still stands — in its soli- 
 tery grandeur and beauty; passed the two bridges to the railroad station — 
 and, Good-bye, Dear Old Folks! — From a letter written by Dr. Holmes, 
 Jan. 1, 1885, quoted in "The Poet Among the Hills." 
 
 Lenox, August 17, 1854- — Oliver Wendell Holmes spends his sum- 
 mer months upon a beautiful farm near Pittsfleld, on which are half 
 a hundred acres of the original forest trees, some of them doubtless 
 five hundred years old; trees that heard the Revolutionary cannon, (or 
 heard of them) that heard before that, the crack of the rifle in early 
 colonial Indian wars, when Miahcomo, with his fugitive Fequots, took 
 refuge in the Berkshire hills. It is said that Dr. Holmes has measured 
 with a tape-line every tree on his place, and knows each one of them 
 with intimate personal acquaintance. If he has not, he ought to do it. 
 
 if ^f !* * * 
 
 Our first excursion in Lenox was one of salutation to our notable 
 trees. We had a nervous anxiety to see that the ax had not hewn, nor 
 the lightning struck them; that no worm had gnawed at the root, or 
 cattle at the trunk; that their branches were not broken, nor their leaves 
 failing from drought. We found them all standing in their uprightness. 
 They lifted up their heads toward heaven, and sent down to us from all 
 their boughs a leafy whisper of recognition and affection. Blessed be the 
 dew that cools their evening leaves, and the rains that quench their 
 daily thirst! May the storm be as merciful to them when, in winter, it 
 rears through their branches, as is a harper to his harp! Let the snow 
 li° lightly on ^neir boughs, and long hence be the summer that shall find 
 no leaves to clothe these nobles of the pasture! — From "A Walk Among 
 Trees," one of the utar Papers," by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 Among the wild flowers are the trailing arbutus, violet, hepati- 
 ca, anemone, bloodroot, trillium, meadow rue, columbine, buttercup, 
 daisy, blue-eyed grass, sweet brier, harebell, mountain laurel, clover, 
 thistle, goldenrod, aster, fringed gentian, azalea, orchis, lily, lady's- 
 slipper, pitcher-plant, and rose. 
 
 The following poem about the gentian was written by William 
 CuUen Bryant. 
 
 * East Street In Pittsfleld. 
 t His Pittsfleld farm. 
 
35 
 
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36 
 TO THE FRINGED GENTIAN. 
 
 Thou blossom bright with autumn dew, 
 And colored with the heaven's own blue. 
 That openest when the quiet light 
 Succeeds the keen and frosty night, — 
 
 Thou comest not when violets lean 
 O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen, 
 Or columbines, in purple dressed, 
 Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest. 
 
 Thou waitest late and com'st alone. 
 When woods are bare and birds are flown. 
 And frosts and shortening days portend 
 The aged year is near his end. 
 
 Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye 
 Look through its fringes to the sky. 
 Blue — blue — as if that sky let fall 
 A flower from its cerulean wall. 
 
 I would that thus, when I shall see 
 The hour of death draw near to me, 
 Hope blossoming witnin my heart. 
 May look to heaven as I depart. 
 
 The heaven-dyed violet in its native shade 
 Fragrance diffuses through the forest gloom: 
 
 No flower in royal garden is arrayed 
 Like our white water-lily in its bloom. 
 
 From Dr. Allen's Jubilee Poem, 1844. 
 
 Mr. Longfellow's wedding visit to Pittsfield was followed by others. 
 The most interesting was in the summer of 1849, which he spent at the 
 Broadhall boarding-house. He was much impressed by the beauty of 
 the neighboring South Mountain, and the variety of grand views from it. 
 He took great pleasure with his children on the shores of the charming 
 lakelet in the Broadhall grounds, where he one day had an adventure, 
 with danger enough to give it zest. The little ones craved some beau- 
 tiful pond-lilies that floated on the surface of the lakelet — to which some 
 of the later ladies of Broadhall gave the pet name of "The Lily-Bowl." 
 There was no craft near, save a crazy, leaky little boat; but, like the 
 devoted father and child-lover he was, he risked himself in it to secure 
 
3r 
 
 a S 5 
 « 5 S 2 
 
 c ^ ' 
 B -2 
 
38 
 
 the coveted prize, although the miserable little broken shell threat- 
 ened every moment to sink with him. He tells of several pleasant drives, 
 but was clearly the most delighted with an afternoon excursion to Roaring 
 Brook. This notable mountain streamlet dashes down a romantic gorge 
 In the west side of Washington Mountain, — a summit of the Hoosacs. 
 From "The Poet Among the Hills," by J. E. A. Smith. 
 
 It must not be supposed that these flowers have been arranged in 
 such various and attractive forms simply to gratify the eye of man when 
 he should come along with a power to perceive and enjoy their beauty. 
 . . . The flowers began to combine in groups, and associate in spikes, 
 clusters, racemes, and umbels, a good many cycles before man was taken 
 into the account. . . . 
 
 It was a practical question of getting a living, a real matter of life 
 and death with these flowers, whether they should combine and live 
 closer together, or scatter themselves in isolation along the stems on 
 which they dwelt. Because every one of them depended, for the per- 
 petuation of its kind, upon the visits of insects on their travels, who, 
 carrying the pollen across from flower to flower, cross-fertilised the blos- 
 soms and so secured the continuance of the plant. That result was 
 most certainly attained in the case of those stalks on which the blos- 
 soms were crowded most thickly. For there the hurrying bees and 
 wasps and moths and smaller honey hunters . . . could most easily 
 take up the pollen from one blossom and dust it over the next. But more 
 than this, these busy creatures were more certain to alight and try their 
 luck for sweets on some spot where a cluster of flowers made the red 
 or the white or the yellow more conspicuous than it could be in a single 
 blossom. . . . Thus the tendency to gather in groups helped perpetuate 
 the flowers in which that tendency occurred. . . . Some of the smaller 
 flower-folk were still at a disadvantage. Only by crowding together 
 ir closest contact could they vie in attractiveness with their stronger, 
 because brighter, rivals and so advertise their presence to the travelling 
 insects. But when some of them did thus crowd together into a dense 
 head, the tendency to dense-headedness was started and continued; and 
 something began to be added to that tendency. Some of the outer flowers 
 were set apart for the especial duty and task of attracting attention, 
 while to the inner group was given the work of secreting the honey 
 which was the price paid for the services of the useful insects. 
 
 That was the way in which the great family of the composite flowers 
 came to be, — ^he family which includes the daisy and the sunflower, the 
 golden-rod and the imortelle, the tansy and the chrysanthemum. Grant 
 Allen calls these the most advanced, the most highly civilised of all the 
 plants. They deserve the distinction. They have come to live in little 
 communities, and they have reached the point of a division of labor. 
 
39 
 
 Every daisy by the roadside is a village of tiny flowers. In that village 
 there are two sets of workingmen, the ray-flowers which serve to invite 
 the attention of the passing collector of sweets, and the disk-flowers 
 whose office is to furnish him with goods when he has been attracted. . . . 
 The freight lines of our great railways cut no figure whatever in 
 comparison with the innumerable companies organised for the carriage 
 of pollen-dust from flower to flower in the maintenance of plant life. The 
 Black & Gold Despatch Company, the Wasps' Express Freight, the 
 Moths' Night Line, are two or three of the corporations (unlimited) 
 which transact the enormous business of moving a summer's crops of 
 pollen. And when the season is over and the harvest is gathered it is 
 the habit of the restless children of these flower communities to say 
 gcod-by to their homes and to the village in which they have been born, 
 and sally forth to found new homes and new villages for themselves. 
 To do this they take their own private cars, run on the tracks of the great 
 Air-Line System, and by way of the Great North-Western, the East Wind 
 Consolidated, or the South-Western Central, fly to new lands . . . 
 You may see them next fall, when the thistle floats on the breeze and 
 the aster seeds start on their overland journeys. — From "Nature Studies 
 in Berkshire," by John Coleman Adams. 
 
 VI. 
 
 ANIMALS. 
 
 Domestic. — Horse: Beast of burden; intelligent. 
 
 Mule: Beast of btirden. 
 
 O.v: Strong; itsed for work. 
 
 Cozv: Milk ; butter ; cheese ; tallow ; flesh used for food ; 
 hide used for leather. 
 
 Goat: Gives milk; hide useful. 
 
 Sheep: Flesh used for food; hide useful; wool. 
 
 Swine: Flesh used for food; lard. 
 
 Dog: Varies in size and color; faithful pet; valued in hunting 
 and as a protector. 
 
 Cat: Catches mice; fur soft. 
 The field, with slight undulations, slopes pretty directly down. Near 
 the lower verge, a rude sort of barn, or rather haystack roofed over, and 
 with hay protruding and hanging out. An ox feeding, and putting up his 
 muzzle to pull down a mouthful of hay; but seeing me, a stranger, in 
 the upper part of the field, he remains long gazing, and finally betakes 
 himself to feeding again. A solitary butterfly flitting to and fro, blown 
 
40 
 
 slightly on its course by a cool September wind, — the coolness of which 
 begins to be tempered by a bright glittering sun. There is dew on the 
 grass. 
 
 There are multitudes of sheep among the hills, and they appear very 
 tame and gentle; though sometimes, like the wicked, they "flee when no 
 man pursueth." But, climbing a rude, rough, rocky, stumpy, ferny height 
 yesterday, one or two of them stood and stared at me with great earnest- 
 ness. I passed on quietly, but soon heard an immense baa-ing up the 
 hill, and all the sheep came galloping and scrambling after me, baa-ing 
 with all their might in innumerable voices, running in a compact body, 
 expressing the utmost eagerness, as if they sought the greatest imagi- 
 nable favor from me; and so they accompanied me down the hillside. . . . 
 Doubtless they had taken it into their heads that I brought them salt. 
 
 4< * 4> * « 
 
 Pig-drover, with two hundred pigs. They are much more easily 
 driven on rainy days than on fair ones. One of his pigs, a large one, 
 particularly troublesome as to running off the road toward every object, 
 and leading the drove. Thirteen miles about a day's journey, in the 
 course of which the drover has to travel about thirty. 
 
 They have a dog, who runs to and fro, . . . barking at those who 
 straggle on the flanks of the line of march, then scampering to the other 
 side and barking there, and sometimes having quite an affair of barking 
 and surly grunting with some refractory pig, who has found something 
 to munch, and refuses to quit it. The pigs are fed on corn at their halts. 
 
 4c * « * :|c 
 
 There are a great many dogs kept in the village,* and many of the 
 travellers also have dogs. Some are almost always playing about; and 
 if a cow or a pig be passing, two or three of them scamper forth for an 
 attack. Some of the younger sort chase pigeons, wheeling as they wheel. 
 If a contest arises between two dogs, a number of others come with huge 
 barking to join the fray, though I believe that they do not really take any 
 active part in the contest, but swell the uproar by way of encouraging the 
 combatants. When a traveller is starting from the door, his dog often 
 gets in front of the horse, placing his fore-feet down, looking the horse in 
 the face, and barking loudly, then, as the horse comes on, running a lit- 
 tle farther, and repeating the process; and this he does in spite of his 
 master's remonstrances, till, the horse being fairly started, the dog fol- 
 lov/s on quietly. One dog, a diminutive little beast, has been taught to 
 stand on his hind legs, and rub his face with his paw. . . . Another 
 springs at people whom his master points out to him, barking and pre- 
 tending to bite. . . . They appear to take much interest in one 
 another; but there is always a degree of caution between two strange 
 dogs when they meet. — From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "American Note- 
 Books." 
 
 •North Adams. 
 
41 
 
 Domestic Fowls. — Hen: Eggs; feathers; flesh' valued as food. 
 Duck: Eggs; feathers; flesh valued as food; fond of water; 
 webbed feet. 
 
 Goose: Eggs; feathers; flesh used for food; webbed feet. 
 Turkey: Eggs; feathers; flesh valued for food. 
 Guinea-hen: Eggs; flesh used for food. 
 Pigeon: Flesh used for food. 
 
 Lenox, August 12, 1838. — Seven chickens hatched. J. T. Headley* 
 and brother called. Eight chickens. 
 
 August 21. — iiiight more chickens hatched. Ascended a mountain with 
 my wife; a beautiful, mellow, autumnal sunshine. 
 
 * 4i llf * * 
 
 The queer gestures and sounds of a hen looking about for a place 
 to deposit her egg; her self-important gait; the side way turn of her 
 head and cock of her eye, as she pries into one and another nook, croaking 
 all the while, — evidently with the idea that the egg in question is the 
 most important thing that has been brought to pass since the world 
 began. — From Nathaniel Hawthorne's '"American Note-Books." 
 
 Lenox, October, 18o4- — The greatest event in a hen's life is compound, 
 being made up of an egg and a cackle. ... If you chase her, she runs 
 cackling; if you pelt her with stones, she streams through the air cack- 
 ling all abroad till the impulse has run out, when she subsides quietly 
 Into a silly, gadding hen. Now and then an eccentric hen may be found 
 stepping quite beyond the limits of hen-propriety. One such has persisted 
 in laying her daily egg in the house. She would steal noiselessly in at 
 the open door, walk up stairs, and leave a plump egg upon the children's 
 bed. The next day she would honor the sofa. On one occasion she select- 
 ed my writing-table and scratching my papers about, left her card, that I 
 might not blame the children or servants for scattering my manuscripts. 
 . . . One Sabbath morning we drove her out of the second-story 
 window, then again from the front hall. In a few moments she was 
 heard behind the house, and on looking out the window, she was just 
 disappearing into the bed-room window on the ground-floor! Word was 
 given, but before any one could reach the place, she had bolted out of 
 the window with victorious cackle, and her white, warm egg lay upon the 
 lounge. I proposed to open the pantry-window, set the egg-dish within' 
 her reaeh, and let her put them up herself; but those in authority would 
 not permit such a deviation from propriety. Such a breed of hens could 
 never be popular with the boys. It would spoil that glorious sport of 
 hunting hen's nests. — From "Mid-October Days," one of the "Star Papers," 
 by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 *A noted author. 
 
42 
 
 Wild Animals. — Rabbit: Found in woods and fields; covered 
 with hair, fore legs short ; flesh used for food. 
 
 Hare: Resembles the rabbit; feeds on vegetable food. 
 
 Squirrel: Gray squirrel used for food; red squirrel; flying 
 squirrel. 
 
 Chipmunk: Reddish color with stripes. 
 
 Fox: Burrows in the ground; shy; reddish brown; pointed 
 nose ; triangular ears ; bushy tail. 
 
 Muskrat: Shaded dark and light brown; tail flat. 
 
 Woodchiick: Reddish brown fur; short legs; pointed nose; 
 feeds on vegetable food ; burrows in the ground. 
 
 Weasel: Small; reddish brown; nimble; eyes small ; sleeps dur- 
 mg the day ; color white in winter ; feeds on small animals. 
 
 Porcupine: Covered with quills; torpid in winter. 
 
 Mink: Downy fur and long hair; lives near streams; bushy 
 tail ; feeds on small animals ; fur valuable. 
 
 Otter: Head broad and flat ; fur smooth, brown arid shining. 
 
 Skunk : Black and white fvir. 
 
 Deer: Valued for food. 
 
 Wildcat: Found in woods and on mountain sides ; color, mixed 
 brown and yellow ; tail short ; claws long, sharp, and flat. 
 
 Lynx: Resembles the wildcat ; some species hunted for fur. 
 
 Raccoon: Lives in hollow trees; sleeps during day; feeds on 
 small animals and vegetable food ; brown ; bushy tail. 
 
 Bear: Lives in a den; feeds on small animals and vegetables; 
 black bushy tail. 
 
 Bears still inhabit Saddleback and the neighboring mountains and 
 forests. Six were taken in Pownall* last year and two hundred foxes. 
 Sometimes they appear on the hills, in close proximity to this village.! — 
 From Nathaniel Howthorne's "■American Note'Books." 
 
 Fish and Other Water Animals. — Pickerel: Long; slim, 
 long head ; large mouth ; weight, under five pounds ; brottght from 
 Connectict:t about 1810 and put into Onota Lake; eats smaller fish; 
 valuable for food. 
 
 *A town in Vermont near Williamstown. 
 tNorth Adams. 
 
43 
 
Trout: Formerly very abundant in brooks in Berkshire; pick- 
 erel and refuse from factories have driven many away ; small, 
 speckled ; pretty ; very choice food. 
 
 Perch: Shapely; pretty ; active ; rather-T small; good for food. 
 
 Bass: Valuable for food; large; preys upon srnall fish. 
 
 Snnfish or pumpkinseed: Found in ponds, small creeks, and 
 rivers. 
 
 Eel: Long; serpent-like; thick; shiny skin, 
 
 Bullhead: Dark brown and white; not very large; good for 
 food. 
 
 Dace: Not valued for food. 
 
 Sucker: Not considered specially valuable but is at its best 
 in spring; mouth peculiar, adapted for sucking food. 
 
 Turtle: Common in lakes. 
 
 Snapping turtle: Good for food. 
 
 I have my opinion of a man who only values a brook or a pond for 
 what he can get out of it. . . . The man who loves nature and fish 
 is not open to objection; but the man who cares for only so much nature 
 as he can reach with a trout-pole and line is not a competent judge of 
 her charms. — From "Nature Studies in Berkshire," by J. Coleman 
 Adams. 
 
 No man should take a single fish, or bag a single bird, beyond the 
 number which can be used for food by himself or his friends. To fish all 
 day in solitary lakes, or in the streams of the wilderness, when it is cer- 
 tain that not one in twenty of the trout taken can be used, is not any 
 more a violation of humanity than it is of the public sentiment of all 
 true sportsmen. A man who would stand at a pigeon roost and fire by 
 the hour into the dense mass of fluttering birds, only to kill them, is a, 
 butcher and a brute. — Fro7n "The Morals of Fishing," one of the "Star 
 Papers," by Heriry Ward Beecher. 
 
 Birds. — Sparrow, robin, oriole, woodpecker, humming-bird, 
 blue jay, snowbird, wild duck, , wild goose, crow, hawk, catbird, 
 phabe-bird, partridge, swallow, quail, pigeon, owl, bluebird, 
 yellowbird, bobolink, whippoorwill. king-bird. Kingfisher: preys 
 upon fish. Shrike : preys upon small birds. Heron. 
 
 On the road to Northampton, we passed a tame crow, which was sit- 
 ting on the peak of a barn. The crow flew down from its perch, and fol- 
 lowed us a great distance, hopping along the road, and flying, with its large, 
 black, flapping wings, from post to post of the fence, or from tree to tree. 
 
45 
 
 At last he gave up the pursuit with a croak of disappointment. The 
 
 driver said, perhaps correctly, that the crow had scented some salmon 
 
 which was in a baslcet under the seat, and that this was the secret of 
 
 his pursuing us. 
 
 * ^t * * * 
 
 The cawing of the crow resounds among the woods. A sentinel is 
 aware of your approach a great way off and gives the alarm to his com- 
 rades loudly and eagerly, — Caw, caw, caw! Immediately the whole con- 
 clave replies, and you behold them rising above the trees, flapping darkly, 
 and winging their way to deeper solitudes. Sometimes, however, they 
 remain till you come near enough to discern their sable gravity of aspect, 
 each occupying a separate bough, or perhaps the blasted tip-top of a pine. 
 As you approach, one after another, with loud cawing, flaps his wings and 
 throws himself upon the air. — From Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''American 
 Note-Books." 
 
 A single bird in one season destroys millions of insects for its own 
 food and for the supply of its nest. No computation can be made of the 
 insects which birds devour. We do not think of another scene more in- 
 spiriting than the plowing season, in this respfect. Bluebirds are in the 
 tops of trees practicing the scales, crows are cawing as they lazily swing 
 through the air toward their companions in the tops of distant dead and 
 dry trees; robins and blackbirds are wide awake, searching every clod 
 that the plough turns, and venturesome almost to the farmer's heels. 
 Even boys relent and seem touched by the birds' appeal to their 
 confidence, and, until small fruits come, spare the birds. Bob'o'links be- 
 gin to appear. . . . 
 
 We charge every man with positive dishonesty who drives birds from 
 his garden in fruit-time. The fruit is theirs as well as yours. They 
 took care of it as much as you did. If they had not eaten egg, worm, 
 and bug, your fruit would have been pierced and ruined. They only 
 ccme for wages. No honest man will cheat a bird of his spring and 
 summer's work. — From ''The Value of Birds," one of the "Star Papers" hy 
 Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 Already the snow-sparrows have come down from the north, and 
 are hopping in our hedges, sure precursors of winter. Robins are gath- 
 ering in flocks in the orchards, and preparing for their southern flight. 
 May his gun forever miss fire that would thin the ranks of singing-birds! 
 
 Lifted far above all harm of fowler or impediment of mountain, wild 
 fowl are steadily flying southward. The simple sight of them fllls the 
 imagination with pictures. They have all summer long called to each 
 other from the reedy fens and wild oat-fields of the far north. Summer 
 Is already extinguished there. Winter is following their track, and 
 marching steadily toward us. The spent flowers, the seared leaves, the 
 thinning tree-tops, the morning rime of frost, have borne witness of the 
 change on earth; and these caravans of the upper air confirm the tidings. 
 Summer is gone; winter is coming! — From, "Mid-October Days," one of 
 the "Star Papers," by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
40 
 
47 
 
 The rushing brook, the tuneful, blithsome bird, 
 
 The busy hum of insects on the flower, 
 A.nd solemn voice of grove, by breezes stirred; — 
 
 These are but hymns to God's eternal power. 
 
 Frovi Dr. Allen's Berkshire Jubilee Poem. 
 
 Insects, etc The honey-bee is quite abtmdant and consider- 
 able honey is produced. That extracted from buckwheat is dark 
 and much less valuable than that extracted from ordinary flowers. 
 
 I\ame as many as you can of the insects found in Berkshire 
 County. 
 
 As I sit in my study.* with the windows open, the occasional inci- 
 dent of the visit of some Winged creature. — wasp, hornet, or bee, — enter- 
 ing out of the warm sunny atmosphere, soaring round the room in large 
 sweeps, then buzzing against the glass, as not satisfied with the place, 
 and desirous of getting out. Finally, the joyous, uprising curve with 
 which, coming to the open part of the window, it emerges into the cheer- 
 ful glow of the outside. — From Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''American Note- 
 Books." 
 
 Lenox, October, 185/f. — From under the unthreshed straw mice squeak 
 and quarrel; lonesome spiders are repairing their webs in the windows 
 that catch nothing but dust and chaff. Yet these bum bailiffs have grown 
 plump on something. I wonder what a spider is thinking about for 
 hours together, down in tht dark throat of his web, where he lies as still 
 as if he were dead. — From "Mid-October Days," one of the "Star Papers," 
 by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 A bat being startled, probably, out of the meeting-house, by the com- 
 motion around, flew blindly about in the sunshine, and alighted on a 
 man's sleeve. I looked at him, — a droll, winged, beast-insect, creeping 
 up the man's arm, not over clean, and scattering dust on the man's coat 
 from his vampire wings. The man stared at him, and let the spectators 
 stare for a minute, and then shook him gently off . . . Bats are very 
 numerous in these parts. — From Nathaniel Haivthorne'i "American Note- 
 Books." 
 
 Lenox, July, lH5.'i. — This is perfect rest. The ear is full of bird's 
 notes, of insects' hum, of the barn-yard clack of hens and peeping of 
 chickens; the eye is full of noble outlined hills, of meadow-growing trees, 
 of grass glancing with light shot from a million dew-drops, and of the 
 great heavenly arch, unstained with cloud. — From ''Gone to the Country,'^ 
 one of the "Star Papers," by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 ♦In Lenox. 
 
48 
 
 Lenox, August 10, 1854. — There is something in the owning of a piece 
 of ground, which affects me as did the old ruins of England. . . . For 
 thousands of years this piece of ground hath wrought its task. Old 
 slumberous forests used to darken it; innumerable deer have trampled 
 across it; foxes have blinked through its bushes, and wolves have howled 
 and growled as they pattered along its rustling leaves with empty maws. 
 How many birds; how many flocks of pigeons thousands of years ago; 
 how many hawks dashing wildly among them; how many insects, noc- 
 turnal and diurnal; how many mailed bugs, and limber serpents, gliding 
 among mossy stones, have had possession here, before my day! It will 
 not be long before I too shall be as wasted and recordless as they. 
 * * * * * 
 
 Let me see what tribes are mine. There are the black and glossy 
 crickets, the grey crickets, the grasshoppers of every shape and hue, the 
 silent, prudent toad, type of conservative wisdom, wise-looking, but slow- 
 hopping; the butterflies by day, and the moth and millers by night; all 
 birds — wrens, sparrows, king-birds, blue birds, robins, and those unnamed 
 warblers that make the forests sad with their melancholy whistle. Be- 
 sides these, who can register the sappers and miners that are always at 
 work in the soil: angle- worms, white grubs, and bugs that carry pick and 
 shovel in the head? Who can muster all the mice that nest in the barn 
 or nibble in the stubble-field, and all the beetles that sing bass in the 
 wood's edge to the shrill treble of gnats and myriad mosquitos? These 
 all are mine! 
 
 Are they mine? Is it my eye and my hand that mark their paths and 
 circuits? Do they hold their life from me, or do I give them their food 
 in due season? Vastly as my bulk is greater than theirs, am I so much 
 superior that I can despise, or even not admire? Where is the strength 
 of muscle by which I can spring fifty times the length of my body? That 
 grasshopper's thigh lords it over mine. Spring up now in the evening 
 air, and fly toward the lights that wink from yonder hill-side! Ten mil- 
 lion wings of despised flies and useless insects are mightier than hand or 
 foot of mine. Each mortal thing carries some quality of distinguishng 
 excellence by which it may glory, and say, "In this, I am first in all the 
 world!" 
 
 Since the same hand made me that made them, and the same care 
 feeds them that spreads my board, let there be fellowship between us 
 .... I, too, am but an insect on a larger scale. Are there not those 
 who tread with unsounding feet through the invisible air, of being so 
 vast, that I seem to them but a mite, a flitting insect? And of capac- 
 ities so noble and eminent, that all the stories which I could bring of 
 thought and feeling to them would be but as the communing of a grass- 
 hopper with me, or the chirp of a sparrow? 
 
 The line that divides between the animal and the divine is the line 
 of suffering. The animal, for its own pleasure, inflicts suffering. The 
 
49 
 
 divine endures suffering for another's pleasure. Not then when he went 
 up to the proportions of original glory was Christ the greatest; but when 
 he descended, and wore our form, and bore our sins and sorrows, that by 
 his stripes we might be healed! — From "Dream Culture," by Henry Ward 
 Beecher. 
 
 If we consider the lives of the lower animals, we shall see in them 
 
 a close parallelism to those of mortals; — toil, struggle, danger, privation,. 
 
 mingled with glimpses of peace and ease; enmity, affection, a continual 
 
 hope of bettering themselves, although their objects lie at less distance 
 
 before them than ours can do. 
 
 * * * * m 
 
 Language. — human language, — after all, is but little better than the 
 creak and cackle of fowls and other utterances of brute nature, — some- 
 times not so adequate. — From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "American Note- 
 Books." 
 
 August 11, 1854. — You know that no enemy lurks in that fairy pool. 
 You can see every nook and corner of it, and it is as sweet a bathing pool 
 as ever was swum by long-legged grasshoppers. Over the root comes a 
 butterfly with both sails a little drabbled, and quicker than light he is 
 plucked down, leaving three or four bubbles behind him, fit emblems of 
 a butterfly's life. There! did I not tell you? Now go away all maiden 
 crickets and grasshoppers! These fair surfaces, so pure, so crystalline, 
 so surely safe, have a trout somewhere in them lying in wait for you! 
 
 But what if one sits between both kinds of music, leaves above and 
 water below? What if birds are among the leaves, sending out random 
 calls, far-piercing and sweet, as if they were lovers, saying, "My dear, 
 are you there?" If you are half reclining upon a cushion of fresh new 
 moss, that swells up between the many-piled and twisted roots of a huge 
 beech tree, and if you have been there half an hour without moving, and 
 if you will still keep motionless, you may see what they who walk through 
 forests never see. 
 
 Yonder is a red squirrel on the ground, utterly without fear, and 
 prying about in that pert and nimble way that always makes me laugh. 
 They are so proud of their tails too! They always hold them up, and 
 coquette with them as a lady twirls and flourishes her fan. And though 
 when running on the ground, or peeping about for seeds, they trail them 
 at full length, yet they never sit down for a moment without closing up 
 this important member as if they feared that something would step on 
 it. If you lie down, you may now and then see gray squirrels in the tops 
 of trees, playing with great glee, and quite as supple as their smaller 
 kindred. They travel along a forest top, springing from branch to branch 
 almost as easily as a man walks across a meadow. 
 
50 
 
 But we must enjoy the sight of birds that come down on to the ground, 
 inquiring after their dinner. A bird is the perfection of grace, of motion, 
 of symmetry of form, and of personal neatness. Their wallt is so comical 
 when they do walk, and their hop, if hopping is their preference, is so 
 agile and pretty, their habit of prying under leaves, of looking into crev- 
 ices, of searching the axils of leaves for a chance morsel that may have 
 been put away there, keeps one that watches in a perpetual smile. — From 
 '"A Walk Among Trees," one of the "Star Papers," by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 VII. 
 OCCUPATIONS.. 
 
 (A production map, or a map of the county with the names of the important productions 
 and industries written in the proper places would be interesting and helpful.) 
 
 ISJattiral features — such as rivers and streams, mountains, the 
 growth of trees, and mineral deposits — all have an influence on the 
 industries of a region. 
 
 The Housatonic River has offered inducements for the location 
 of mills in the places thru which it flows. 
 
 Pittsfield. — The beginning of the woolen industry in Pitts- 
 field was in Arthur Scolfield's carding machine, which afterwards 
 developed into Pomeroy's Mills. The Pontoosuc Mill went into 
 operation in 1827. For many years the mills at Barkerville and 
 Stearnsville were very prosperous. Other woolen-mills which have 
 helped the growth of Pittsfield are Russell's, Peck's, Taconic, Bel 
 Air, and Tillotson's. They are run partly by water-power and 
 partly by steam. 
 
 Among the other important industries of Pittsfield are the 
 manufacture of shoes, tacks, paper, machinery, knit underwear, and 
 silk thread and braid. The Pittsfield Electric Company and the 
 Stanley Electric Works have lately become of importance in the 
 business of Pittsfield. 
 
 One mill which ought to be specially mentioned is the Govern- 
 ment Mill at Coltsville. In this mill is made the paper used by the 
 United States government for bank bills and government bonds. 
 
51 
 
 The Eastern Branch of the Housatonic, with springs 
 and waterfalls, furnishes water privileges for paper-mills. The 
 purity of the water used in these mills and extreme care in manu- 
 facturing make the paper of Dalton among the finest in the world. 
 There is also a large shoe-factory. Hinsdale uses its water-power 
 to run woolen-mills. 
 
 On the Housatonic River Lee has sawmills, grist-mills, paper- 
 mills, and a great industry in marble. Lee also produces lime of a 
 very fine quality. South Lee has paper-mills. Stockbridge has 
 sawmills and grist-mills. Great Barrington has cotton-mills, wool- 
 en-mills, paper-mills, and an electrical industry. 
 
 The Towns along the Hoosac River also have important m- 
 dustries. Adams manufactures paper and has the large Plunkett 
 and Renfrew cotton-mills. North Adams contains the Arnold and the 
 Windsor Print Works covering several acres, also shoe-factories, 
 and machine-shops. Williamstown, altho engaged principally in 
 farming and dairying, has sawmills and a factory for print goods. 
 
 Agriculture. — In Clarksburg, Florida, and other hill towns, 
 the chief business is agriculture and there is some lumbering. Dairy- 
 ing is quite general. From Cheshire, in 1802, a cheese weighing 
 1600 pounds, and made from one day's curd contributed by all the 
 neighbors, was sent to President Jeti'erson. In Hancock and Lanes- 
 boro farming is fairly successful. 
 
 The farms in many towns on the eastern side of Berkshire are 
 decreasing in value. In Savoy we find scarcely any industries ex- 
 cept a few coal-kilns. Windsor has a small population and its 
 farms are being abandoned or united with others. Washington and 
 Becket are fairly productive tho hilly, but sawmills are decreasing 
 as forests are being cut down. Otis, Peru, Sandisfield, New Marl- 
 boro Mt. Washington, West Stockbridge, Richmond, Alford, Tyr- 
 ingham, Monterey, and Egremont have but little agriculture with 
 some stock raising. Tobacco is quite extensively raised in Tyring- 
 ham. Sheffield has grain in its fertile parts. 
 
 Farming in the county is much less important and profitable 
 than in former years on account of the great increase of agriculture 
 
52 
 
 in the western states, whose products can be sold here more cheaply 
 than our own. 
 
 BURNING CHARCOAL. 
 
 (The wood to be made into charcoal is placed in the kilns, from which 
 most of the air is shut off and where it is slowly charred.) 
 
 Quarries. — One of our most valuable industries is that of quar- 
 rying, some of the productions going to many parts of the country. 
 One valuable belt passes thru Lenox, Lee, Great Harrington, Al- 
 ford, West Stockbridge, and Richmond. 
 
 Great Barrington has blue limestone which can be split and is- 
 used largely for building. 
 
 New Ashford, Alford, and Becket have blue and white marble,, 
 the latter taking a high polish. In former years marble was quar- 
 ried in Lanesboro. The bricks used in building the Pontoosuc Mill 
 were also made there. 
 
 In Cheshire some of the purest lime in the world is made in 
 large quantities. 
 
 The professions and general occupations which are necessary 
 in every place are especially well represented in Berkshire County.. 
 
53 
 
 Make as complete a list as you can of the different professions, 
 trades, and other lines of work or business not already mentioned 
 by means of which people earn their living. Name, also, as many 
 as you can of the business institutions of the county — Berkshire 
 Life Insurance Company, Berkshire County Savings Bank, etc. 
 
 Summer Resort. — For many years Berkshire has been a fa- 
 mous summer resort. Many people have fine summer residences 
 
 THE HOPKINS-SEARLES MANSION. 
 (In Great Barrington.) 
 
 here. There are many hotels and boarding houses in most of the 
 Berkshire towns for the accommodation of people who come here 
 to enjoy our beautiful scenery and good air. 
 
 When I removed into the country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned 
 farmhouse,* which had no piazza — a deficiency the more regretted, be- 
 cause not only did I like piazzas, . . . but the country round about 
 was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale 
 without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt painters 
 painting there. A very paradise of painters. 
 
 Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew. . . .For 
 how, otherwise, could it have entered the builder's mind, that, upon the 
 clearing being made, such a purple prospect would be his? — nothing less 
 
 *CalIed "Arrowhead" by Mr. Melville. It is on the Holmes Road about three-fourths of 
 a mile southwest of Dr. Holmes's summer residence. 
 
54 
 
 than Greylock, with all his hills about him, like Charlemagne* among 
 his peers. 
 
 Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza 
 for the convenience of those who might desire to feast upon the view, 
 and take their time and ease about it, seemed as much of an omission 
 as if a picture-galleiT should have no bench; for what but picture-galleries 
 are the marble halls of these same limestone hills? — galleries hung, month 
 after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh. 
 
 A piazza must be had. . . . Now, which side? ... To the 
 east, that long camp of the Hearth Stone HillsJ fading far away. . . . 
 Goodly sight; but to the north is Charlemagne — 'can't have the Hearth 
 Stone Hills with Charlemagne. 
 
 Well, the south side. Apple trees are there. Pleasant, of a balmy 
 morning, in the month of May, to sit and see that orchard, white-budded, 
 as for a bridal; and in October, one green arsenal yard; such piles of 
 ruddy shot. Very fine, I grant; but to the north is Charlemagne. 
 
 The west side, look. An upland pasture, alleying away into a maple 
 wood at top. Sweet, in opening spring, to trace upon the hill-side, other- 
 wise gray and bare — to trace, I say, the oldest paths by their streaks of 
 earliest green. Sweet, indeed, I can't deny; but, to the north is Charle- 
 magne. 
 
 So Charlemagne, he carried it. 
 
 No sooner was ground broken, than all the neighborhood . . . 
 broke too— into a laugh. Piazza to the north! Winter Piazza! Wants, 
 of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora Borealisf I suppose; hope he's 
 laid in good store of Polar muffs and mittens. 
 
 That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are the blue 
 noses of the carpenters, and how they scouted at the greenness of the 
 city, who would build his sole piazza to the north. But march don't last 
 forever; patience, and August comes. 
 
 Even in December, this northern piazza does not repel — nipping cold 
 and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting by 
 the snow, in finest flower — for then, once more, with frosted beard, I pace 
 the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn. H 
 
 • Charlemagne (Charles the Great, or Charles I.) was a famous ruler of Europe— Emperor 
 of the West, and King of France— who was born in 742 and died in 814. His peers were the 
 noblemen of his realm. 
 
 X The Iloosac Mountains; so called because of the fire stone quarries. 
 
 t Northern lights (northern daybreak). 
 
 I "City chap." 
 
 t The cape at the southern extremity of South America. "It is a steep, black, craggy 
 rock, rising like a precipice out of the sea which washes its foot." The climate there is very 
 severe, and sailing around ("doubling") this cape is much dreaded by sailors. Now most 
 steamers go thru the Strait of Magellan and tug-boats are kept there to tow sailing vessels 
 thru, so there is no need of going around the cape at all. 
 
 "Off Cape Horn we had heavy gales. In one moment, by night, three of my best officers, 
 with fifteen sailors, were lost, with the mainyard; the spar snapping under them in the slings, 
 as they sought, with heavers, to beat down the icy sail.'''— From "Benito Cereno," one of "'Tht 
 Piazza Tales," by Herman iitlville. 
 
55 
 
 In the summer, too, Canute-like,* sitting here, one is often reminded 
 of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, 
 and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their 
 beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and 
 the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still 
 August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Linef; 
 but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence 
 and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising be- 
 yond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary J coast 
 an unknown sail. — From "The Piazza,'' one of "The Piazza Tales," by 
 Herman Melville. 
 
 "SHADOW BROOK," LENOX. 
 
 ♦Canute, or Kmit. tlie first Danish king of England, was born in Denmark about 99^. 
 
 A story is told how he rebuked some of his courtiers, who had tried to flatter him by say- 
 ing that all things were possible to him. He ordered his chair to be set on the sea shore while 
 the tide was risinjr, and when the water rolled near him he commanded it to so back and not 
 dare to wet him. who was lord of the ocean But the sea soon wet his feet and he turned to 
 his courtiers and said : "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings ; 
 for there is none worthy of the name but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey." 
 
 tThe Equator, a great circle imagined to pass around the earth half-way between the 
 North Pole and the South Pole. 
 
 JThe Barbary States are "all the countries of Africa, north of the desert of Sahara, 
 and between Egypt and the Atlantic, thus including Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco," 
 on the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. 
 
56 
 
 Lenox is one of the most famous summer resorts in the United 
 States. Its great beauty has attracted people of wealth and taste 
 who have built beautiful and costly residences there. Many people 
 who wish to have at the same time the advantages of city life and 
 country life spend their summers in Pittsfield. These additions to 
 the population of Berkshire contribute much to the wealth of the 
 county. 
 
 None here the forms of industry deride: — 
 All-glittering in the clod the plough to hold; 
 
 From liberal hand the seed to scatter wide, 
 And plant in many a hill the maize of gold: — 
 
 To gather in the fruits, the earth hath borne: 
 
 The scythe to wield where waves the grass in light; 
 
 To ply the careful sickle; and the corn 
 To husk in merry mood; — 'tis pure delight! 
 
 The herds, the fine woolled flocks to feed and train; 
 
 To watch the shuttle, as it quickly flies; 
 Deep in the mine to trace the metal's vein, 
 
 The rocks to quarry in the open skies: 
 
 In graceful shapes the marble blocks to mould 
 And stubborn wood; the milky treasures press; 
 
 Iron with strength of arm to turn to gold: — 
 These various toils fail not to enrich and bless. 
 
 * 4: 4e 4: 4e 
 
 'Tis toil, that braces both the frame and mind: — 
 In wrestling with the wind the tree grows strong; 
 
 Mantled with green the stagnant pool we find, 
 But pure the streams, which murmuring rush along. 
 
 From Dr. William Allen's Jubilee Poem, 18^. 
 
 . . . From not less than twenty-five out of the thirty-two town- 
 ships of Berkshire, the Housatonic gathers its life-currents. By this 
 sign it holds its right and title to be called the Berkshire river. And 
 whenever in its course the lover of Berkshire comes upon it, the river 
 seems to bear to his soul a message from the very heart of the county, 
 from its mountain heights, its greenwood shades, its broad vales and in- 
 tervales, its well-tilled fields, its vistas of enchanting scenery. Some- 
 times the river runs white and broken over its rocky channel like a re- 
 flection of Berkshire skies, flecked with fleecy clouds, driving before the 
 
57 
 
 THE HOUSATONIC RIVER. 
 ("Under overhanging thickets.") 
 
 v,-o Tt is alive with the life of the hills. 
 
 ' M dern ivilization. which is hostile to all grand natural features to 
 forests and to mountains, to waterfalls and to shade-trees, «eems to -ear 
 a special antipathy toward rivers. Fot it attacks them in every c n eiv- 
 ahle way their resources, their utilities, their beauties Th« ^^"^ J^ 
 which th; modern man settles beside a river is a bad one for tt^at^tream 
 Tor he begins at once to tax his powers to see how he - ^-t^^Jf/^ 
 attractions and advantages which have drawn him to s banks. He tr e 
 to tire it out with work, to exhaust it with cruelties. He sti angles 
 t with darL and poisons it with dye-stuffs, and chokes it with sewage^ 
 and stifles it 'in steam-boilers. He tries to starve it to death by cutting « 
 the forest on the mountains whence it feeds itself. He . . • kills 
 111 the fish between its banks. And still the river forgives all and tries 
 U best to keep up the struggle for existence and incidentally to bless the 
 oppr Ir With uses and graces. Here in our Housatonic, - ^ -^^^ ^^ 
 ample of how hard a river dies. It keeps up a magnificent fight again.t 
 
58 
 
 thp vandal powers of the human race, as they fetter it with dams and 
 degrade it in sluiceways and mill-ponds. It yields the service demanded 
 of it, albeit with many a passing fury, fretting itself into foam and 
 broken water. And just as soon as it escapes from men's clutches it takes 
 up its old life of beauty and of blessing. At Glendale, for example, after 
 it has been corralled in a mill-pond and pitched over a dam it recovers 
 itself almost instantly, and before it is pulled into the traces again at 
 Housatonic, its resumes its placid flow, and gathers shadows from the 
 wooded banks, ahd sparkles in the sunlight as if it never had been forced 
 to dirty work and never would be again. After passing Great Barrington, 
 too, the stream which has been compelled to sweat and strain, and scour 
 and scrub for the whole town, resumes its fair aspect and behaves pre- 
 cisely as if it never had drained a sewer or fed a boiler. In its gracious 
 and serene flow through the broad meadows of Stockbridge there is no 
 reminiscence whatsoever of its labors at the mill wheels in Lee. How 
 can one help a species of admiration for the pluck and purpose of the 
 resolute little river, and its unswerving effort not to be beaten, not to be 
 other than it started to be up in the fields of Pittsfleld, and the lanes of 
 Lanesboro, and the fords of New Ashford. One rarely finds a river which 
 so persistently keeps up its character for picturesqueness and rural beauty 
 as the Housatonic, as long as it continues to be a Berkshire stream. — 
 From "Nature Studies in Berkshire,'" by John Coleman Adams. 
 
 VIII. 
 GOVERNMENT. 
 
 CITY GOVERNMENT. 
 
 Each city, town, and cotinty in a state mtist obey the general 
 lav^^s of the state, and can do only those things which the state 
 constitution and the legislature allow it to do. 
 
 Vv hen a town comes to have more people and more needs than 
 the town government provides for, it may ask the state legislature 
 to be made a city. If the legislature thinks it best, it grants the 
 town a City Charter, in which the plan and powers and duties of 
 the new city government are set forth. If the town accepts the 
 charter, it becomes a city and must afterwards conduct its affairs as 
 the charter provides. 
 
59 
 
 Pittsfield became a town in 1761, and, 130 years later, was in- 
 corporated as a city in 1891. 
 
 Most of the business of the City of Pittsfield is carried on un- 
 der the direction of the City Council and the Mayor. The City 
 Council is composed of two branches — the Board of Aldermen and 
 the Coiinnon Council. 
 
 The Board of Aldermen consists of seven members, one from 
 each of the seven zvards in the city. They are elected each Decem- 
 ber to serve one year. The aldermen elect a President. His duties 
 are to preside at the meetings of the Board of Aldermen when the 
 Mavor is absent and to take the Mayor's place if it is vacant by 
 reason of the mayor's death, absence, or disability. The City Clerk 
 keeps a record of the business done at the meetings of the Board 
 of Aldermen. 
 
 The Common Council has 14 members. Each ward elects one 
 councilman each December to serve two years. The Common 
 Council elects a President, who presides at its meetings. It also 
 elects a Clerk, not a member of the Common Council, who keeps a 
 record of its proceedings. 
 
 Most of the business of the City Council is done in this way : — 
 The measure to be voted upon is brought up by one of the two 
 boards of the City Council. The members of the board before 
 which it first comes vote on the measure. If a majority vote for it, 
 it is then brought before the other board and is voted upon. If 
 this vote is favorable, it is brought before the Mayor. If he ap- 
 proves the measure, it goes into effect. If he disapproves, or vetoes 
 the measure, it must be again voted upon by each board. If two- 
 thirds of the members of each board vote in favor of a measure 
 after the mayor's disapproval, or veto, it is passed. 
 
 Some business is transacted by the City Council in joint session, 
 that is, the two boards meet together as one. The Mayor then 
 presides and the City Clerk keeps a record of the business done. 
 
 A Mayor is elected each year at the city election in Decernber. 
 The City Charter of Pittsfield gives the Mayor very little power. 
 Besides approving or disapproving the measures proposed by the 
 
60 
 
 City Council, he appoints the Inspector of Animals, Milk and Pro- 
 visions ; members of the Fire Department and Police Department; 
 the Inspector of Buildings; and some other officials. But these ap- 
 pointments must be approved by the Board of Aldermen. 
 
 Unce in two years the Mayor appoints a member of the License 
 Commission, to serve six years. This appointment is made by the 
 Mayor without having to be approved by the Board of Aldermen. 
 The Mayor, by reason of his office, is Chairman of the School Com- 
 mittee, tho the Committee elects a Chairman to serve when the 
 Mayor is absent. He is also Chairman of various committees of the 
 City Council. 
 
 The City Clerk keeps the general records of the City — such as 
 the records of marriages, births, and deaths. He issues marriage 
 licenses, licenses for keeping dogs, licenses for peddling, and for 
 some other purposes. 
 
 The City Treasurer has the care of the money of the City, 
 lie receives all that is collected by the different city officials. He 
 pays the salaries of the city officers, the bills presented by the differ- 
 ent departments of the city government, and all other bills which 
 the city owes. 
 
 The Auditor is the city's bookkeeper. All bills, excepting cer- 
 tain payrolls, must be passed thru his hands and approved by him 
 before they are paid. 
 
 The City Council and the Mayor decide how much money each 
 department may expend. Most of the money needed by the City to 
 carry on its affairs is raised by taxation. Each male person over 20 
 years of age is required to pay a poll-tax of $2.00 each year. Each 
 person owning real estate (lands and houses) and each person own- 
 ing certain kinds of personal (movable) property pays a tax on such 
 property, the tax being more or less in amount according tj the 
 value of the property. 
 
 To make out a list of tax payers and to determine the value of 
 each person's property and the amount which each should pay, is 
 the duty of the Assessors. These are three in number, one being 
 elected by the City Council each year to serve three years. Each 
 year they appoint a Chairman. 
 
61 
 
. They begin their work on the first day of Alay in catli year. 
 The poll-tax list is given to the Tax Collector on or before the fif- 
 teenth of July. On or before the first of September they give to the 
 lax Collector a list of those who pay a property tax. /\. diicount 
 of three per cent, is allowed to those who pay their taxes before 
 October lo. All who do not pay on or before November lo must 
 pay six per cent, interest on the amount of their tax. 
 
 The Tax Collector pays to the City Treasurer the money which 
 he receives for taxes. 
 
 The Board of Public Works is composed of three members, 
 one of whom is elected each year by the City Council to serve three 
 years. Each year the Board chooses a Chairman and appoints a 
 Clerk. It also appoints such superintendents and agents as its duties 
 require. This Board has charge of highways, streets, sidewalks, 
 common sewers, main drains, bridges, street lights, waterworks and 
 trees in the public streets. It also has charge of the City Hall and 
 public parks. 
 
 The School Committee is composed of 14 members, two from 
 each ward in the city. They hold office for three years. Excepting 
 the Mayor, the Aldermen, and the members of the Common Council, 
 they are the only city officials elected directly by the voters. They 
 have entire charge of the schools and the school buildings. They 
 appoint the Superintendent of Schools, the Triuant Officer, the 
 teachers, and the janitors. 
 
 The Police Department has a Chief and officers to see that 
 there is good order in the city and to arrest and bring into court 
 those who break the laws. 
 
 The Fire Department is composed of a Chief and firemen 
 whose duty is to save buildings, if possible, in case of fire. 
 
 The Inspector of Buildings looks after the safety of buildings, 
 plumbing, etc. 
 
 The City Solicitor has the care of the legal affairs of the city. 
 
63 
 
 He tells the city officials what the laws require and has charge of 
 law suits in which the City engages. 
 
 It is the duty of the Board of Health to look after matters 
 belonging to the public health. 
 
 The City Physician attentls sick people who are too poor to 
 pay for such attendance. 
 
 The Inspector of Milk, Animals and Provisions sees that 
 none but wholesome food is offered for sale. 
 
 The Overseers of the Poor expend the money set apart each 
 year for the care of those who are not able to support themselves. 
 
 The License Commissioners grant licenses for the sale of 
 intoxicating liquors, if the people vote to grant licenses. They have 
 general oversight of hotels and other places which require such a 
 license. 
 
 The Mayor, the Aldermen, and the members of the Common 
 Council, and the members of the School Committee directly repre- 
 sent the people, and act directly for the people in deciding what 
 shall be done and in choosing other officers. 
 
 In addition to his duty to help decide what shall be done, the 
 Mayor has some work which he can appoint no one else to do for 
 him. He receives a salary of $1000 a year. The Aldermen, the 
 members of the Common Council, and the members of the School 
 Committee may appoint others to perform such work as they do not 
 choose to do themselves. They receive no salaries. Most of the 
 other officers of the City and those who are employed to do the 
 city's work are paid for their services, some by the year, some by 
 the week, and some by the day. 
 
 North Adams is the only other city government in Berkshire 
 County. The City Council in North Adams consists of only one 
 board and has 21 members. In general, the officers of North Ad- 
 ams and their duties are like those in Pittsfield, but there are many 
 matters in which the governments of the two Berkshire cities differ. 
 
64 
 
 There is no separate City Court in Pittsfield. Those who 
 break the laws are brought before the Central Berkshire District 
 Court for Hancock. Lanesboro, Peru. Windsor. Hinsdale, Dalton, 
 Washing-ton. Pittsfield, and Richmond. It holds daily sessions in 
 the Court House in Pittsfield. It has a District Judge and a Clerk. 
 
 TOWN GOVERNMENT. 
 
 The Qovernment of Towns is much simpler than that of 
 cities. Such business as is done in cities by the City Council is done 
 m towns either' by the voters themselves in town iiieefitig, or bv the 
 
 TOWN HALL, DALTON. 
 
 Board of Selectmen. The members of this board are usually three 
 in number. 
 
 Besides the selectmen the more important town officers are the 
 
 moderator, town clerk, town treasurer, assessors, tax collector, con- 
 stables, overseers of the poor, surveyor of highzvays, school com- 
 mitteemen, and in some towns trustees of the public library. Town 
 officers are elected at the annual town meeting held in February, 
 March, or April. 
 
65 
 
 The Moderator elected at each town meeting presides except at 
 the meeting held in November for the purpose of electing state 
 officers, at which the selectmen preside. 
 
 The Selectmen are charged with the general supervision of 
 town affairs. They call town meetings ; lay out town highways ; 
 make rules concerning the public health; draw jurymen; represent 
 the town in suits at law, and in matters relating to the county and 
 state; grant licenses to sell intoxicating licjuors, if so ordered by the 
 town ; and they receive, count, and declare the votes in the election 
 of state and national officers. They are sometimes chosen for one 
 year, and sometimes for three, as the town may decide. 
 
 The Town Clerk, Treasurer, Assessors, Tax Collector and 
 Overseers of the Poor have duties similar to those of the same of- 
 ficers in a city. 
 
 Town officers are usually elected for one year, and are gener- 
 ally paid by the day or by fees. 
 
 COUNTY GOVERNMENT. 
 
 Berkshire is one of the 14 counties into which the state of 
 Massachusetts is divided. Most of these counties are divided into 
 towns and cities. In Berkshire County there are two cities and 
 thirty towns. Certain matters which concern the whole county are 
 under the charge of county officers. 
 
 The County Commissioners have the care of the county build- 
 ings, such as the court house and the jail. The county roads are 
 laid out and built under their direction. They have charge of the 
 legal affairs of the county. They lay the county tax and decide 
 what part of it each city or town should pay. They also have other 
 less important duties. 
 
 North Adams, August 23, 1838. — The county commissioners held a 
 court . . . yesterday afternoon, for the purpose of letting out the mak- 
 ing of the new road over the mountain. The commissioners sat together 
 in attitudes of some dignity, with one leg laid across another; and the 
 people, to the number of twenty or thirty, sat around about with their 
 hats on, in their shirt-sleeves, with but little, yet with some formality. 
 Several had come from a distance to bid for the job. They sat with. 
 
66 
 
 whips in their hands. The first bid was three dollars. — then there was 
 a long silence, — then a bid of two dollars eighty-five cents, and finally 
 it was Ivnocked down at two eighteen, per rod. A disposition to bid was 
 evidenced in one man by his joking on the bid of another. — From 
 'Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''American Note-Books." 
 
 The County Treasurer has the care of the county money. He 
 receives all taxes paid by the different towns and cities and all fines 
 taken by the Superior Court.* Out of this money he pays such 
 bills as he is directed to pay by the County Commissioners, and by 
 the courts. It is also his duty to keep for public use the standard 
 weights and measures furnished by the state. 
 
 The Register of Deeds records deeds, mortgages, and other 
 papers. These records are kept with great care and are open for 
 the public to look at. 
 
 The Sheriff and his Officers have to arrest persons accused 
 of crime and keep them locked up until they may have a trial. They 
 have charge of the county jail, attend the county courts and the 
 meetings of the county commissioners when called upon to do so. 
 During the session of the court, it is the duty of the sheriff' to have 
 the care of the prisoners^ zvitnesses, and jury, and to carry out the 
 sentences of the court. 
 
 The Register of Probate and Insolvency keeps all wills and 
 the records of the court of probate and insolvency. 
 
 The Clerk of Courts keeps the records and other papers of the 
 higher courts of the state which hold sessions in the county. 
 
 The clerk of courts and the registrar of probate hold ofiice for 
 five years, the other officers for three years. County officers are 
 elected by the people of the county. They are paid by salaries. 
 
 There is in each county a Judge of Probate and Insolvency, 
 appointed by the Governor. He decides questions about the prop- 
 erty of people who die. 
 
 Besides the District Court for Central Berkshire, which is held 
 
 *Tlie Superior Court is a state court held at Pittsfield, in and for the county of Berkshire, 
 and is the court between the District Courts and the Supreme Judicial Court. 
 
67 
 
 al Pittsfield, there are these district Courts : Northern Berkshire, 
 held at North Adams; Fourth Berkshire, held at Adams; and 
 Southern Berkshire, held at Great Barrington. 
 
 There are two Poliee Courts, one at Williamstown, and one at 
 Lee. 
 
 NATIONAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS. 
 
 Divisions. —In the United States there are (in 1901) forty-five states 
 :.nd several territories and other possessions. Each state is divided into 
 cf^unties, and generally each county is divided into cities and towns. 
 
 The three branches of government are: 
 
 1. Legislative, to make the laws. 
 
 2. Executive, to see that the laws are obeyed. 
 
 3. Judicial, to decide in doubtful cases what the law is, and how 
 
 far it applies in the particular case brought to the judge. 
 
 Government of the United 
 
 States — The legislative department 
 of the United States is the Con- 
 gress. It meets in Washington, 
 the Capital of the United States, 
 to make laws about matters be- 
 longing to the government of the 
 United States but not to the 
 separate states. 
 
 The Congress has two 'branches: 
 the Senate, which is composed of 
 two Senators from each state: 
 and a House of Representatives, 
 in which the number of members 
 from each state depends upon the 
 number of people who live in the 
 state. 
 
 Hon. Henry Laurens Dawes, of Pittsfield, 
 was a member of the United States House 
 of Representatives for eighteen years 0857- 
 1875) and a member of the United States 
 Senate for eighteen years (1875-1893). 
 
 The President is the head of 
 the executive department. 
 
 The Supreme Court is the high- 
 est judicial body. 
 
 In a State the laws for the state are made by a Legislature, which 
 
 HENRY L. DAWES. 
 
68 
 
 meets at the capital of the state and has a Senate and a House of Repre- 
 sentatives, like the Congress of the United States. 
 
 The chief executive officer of a state is called the Governor. 
 
 Each state has a judicial department, like that of the United States. 
 
 In Massachusetts the legislature is called the "Great and General 
 Court." It is divided into a Senate and a House of Representatives. Its 
 members are elected for one year and it meets each year in the State 
 House in Boston, which is the capital of this state. 
 
 The Governor of Massachusetts is elected for one year. 
 
 GEORGE NIXON BRIGGS. 
 
 W. MURRAY CRANE. 
 
 Hon. Georjje Nixon Brigsrs, of Pittsfield, was governor of Massachusetts seven terms from 
 1844 to 1851. Hun. Winthrop Murray Crane, of Daltoii, became governor in 1900 and served 
 three terms. 
 
 The highest judicial body of Massachusetts is composed of a Chief 
 Jvstice and six other Justices, or Judges. It is caiied the Sup'-eme 
 Judicial Court. Its members are appointed by the Governor with the 
 advice and consent of the Council, and hold office during good behavior. 
 
 Hon. James Madison Barker, of Pittsfield, has been a Justice of the Supreme Judicial 
 Court since 1891. 
 
69 
 
 IX. 
 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 The beautiful scenery and the healthfuhiess of Berkshire have 
 produced and attracted many distinguished writers who have found 
 it to their advantage to dwell among our hills. The impression 
 which the country has made upon these authors is shown in their 
 writings. 
 
 Dame Nature did her level best when she fashioned Berkshire. Else- 
 where she has wrought effects more grand, more imposing perhaps, but 
 nowhere scenery more exquisite in variety or more marvelous in quiet 
 beauty. It is a region abounding in lakes and mountain torrents, beau- 
 tiful meadows and pine-dark glens. 
 
 Literature thrives best amid the beautiful. Amid scenes of loveli- 
 ness it buds and blossoms and scatters its sweetest fragrance abroad. So 
 has it been in Berkshire. A literary halo invests this charming region. 
 Irdeed this Berkshire land of ours seems wellnigh the "lake region" of 
 America. — iFrom "The Literary Associations of, Berkshire,"' by James T. 
 Cutler, Neiv England Magazine. 
 
 Henry Wadsworth LongfeU 
 
 low married Miss Frances Apple- 
 ton in 1843. They came to Pitts- 
 field on their wedding journey and 
 stayed at the country residence of 
 the Appleton family, the house on 
 East street now occupied by the 
 Plunkett family. In that "old 
 fashioned country-seat" stood 
 "The Old Clock on the Stairs," 
 about which Mr. Longfellow wrote 
 one of his most beautiful poems. 
 The old clock no longer stands 
 "half-way up the stairs." Longfel- 
 low spent several summers here. It 
 
 was during this period that "Evangeline," "The Belfry at Bruges," 
 
 and many short poems were written. 
 
 HENRY 
 
 LONGFELLOW. 
 
70 
 
 THE OLD CLOCK ON THE STAIRS. 
 
 Somewhat back from the village street 
 Stands the old-fashioned country-seat. 
 Across its antique portico 
 Tall poplar trees their shadows throw; 
 And from its station in the hall 
 An ancient timepiece says to all, — 
 "Forever— never! 
 Never — forever! " 
 
 Half-way up the stairs it stands, 
 
 And points and beckons with its hands 
 
 From its case of massive oak. 
 
 Like a monk, who, under his cloak, 
 
 Crosses himself and sighs, alas! 
 
 With sorrowful voice to all who pass, — 
 
 "Forever — never! 
 
 Never — forever ! " 
 
 By day its voice is low and light; 
 
 But in the silent dead of night. 
 
 Distinct as a passing footstep's fall, 
 
 It echoes along the vacant hall, 
 
 Along the ceiling, along the floor. 
 
 And seems to say at each chamber-door, — 
 
 "Forever — never! 
 
 Never — forever ! " 
 
 Through days of sorrow and of mirth, 
 Through days of death and days of birth, 
 Through every swift vicissitude 
 Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood. 
 And as if, like God, it all things saw. 
 It calmly repeats those words of awe, — 
 
 "Forever — never! 
 
 Never — forever ! " 
 
 In that mansion used to be 
 Free-hearted Hospitality; 
 His great fires up the chimney roared; 
 The stranger feasted at his board; 
 But, like the skeleton at the feast. 
 That warning timepiece never ceased, — 
 
 "Forever — never! 
 
 Never — forever ! " 
 
71 
 
 There groups of merry children played, 
 
 There youths and maidens dreaming strayed; 
 
 precious hours! golden prime, 
 
 And affluence of love and time! 
 
 Even as a miser counts his gold, 
 
 Those hours the ancient timepiece told, — 
 
 "Forever — never! 
 
 Never — forever!" 
 
 From that chamber, clothed in white, 
 
 The bride came forth on her wedding night; 
 
 There, in that silent room below, 
 
 The dead lay in his shroud of snow; 
 
 And in the hush that followed the prayer, 
 
 Was heard the old clock on the stair, 
 
 "Forever — never! 
 
 Never — forever! " 
 
 All are scattered now and fled. 
 Some are married, some are dead; 
 And when I ask, with throbs of pain, 
 "Ah! when shall they all meet again?" 
 As in the days long since gone by, 
 The ancient timepiece makes reply, — 
 
 "Forever — never! 
 
 Never — forever! " 
 
 Never here, forever there, 
 Where all parting, pain, and care, 
 And death, and time shall disappear, — 
 Forever there, but never here! 
 'The horologe of Eternity 
 Sayeth this incessantly, — 
 
 "Forever — never ! 
 
 Never — forever! " 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes. — On the old Lenox road about two 
 miles from the Park, is the house where Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 spent what he called "seven blessed summers." He was a poet, a 
 novelist, and an essayist. He was also a physician of great promi- 
 nence. He was very fond of nature, especially of trees. Trees 
 planted by the hand of Dr. Holmes are still growing on the place. 
 Col. Jacob Wendell, a great-grandfather of Dr. Holmes, was one 
 of the early settlers of Pittsfield, and the poet's farm was a part of 
 
72 
 
 /Mr€yty /^/^^. 
 
 the twenty-four thousand acres bought by Col. Wendell when Pon- 
 • toosuck was first laid out as a township. More than one character 
 and bit of scenery in "Elsie Venner," a novel written by Dr. Holmes, 
 is thought to have had its original in Pittsfield. While here he 
 wrote "The Dedication of the Pittsfield Cemetery," "The Plough- 
 man," and "Lines Read at the Berkshire Jubilee." After the death 
 of Dr. Holmes, his son, Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, gave many 
 volumes from his father's library to the Berkshire Athenaeum. 
 
 THE PLOUGHMAN.* 
 
 Clear the brown path, to meet his coulter's gleam! 
 Lo! on he comes, behind his smoking team, 
 With toil's bright dew-drops on his sunburnt brow, 
 The lord of earth the hero of the plough! 
 
 ♦Read at the anniversary of the Berkshire Agricultural Society, October 4, 18-19. 
 
73 
 
 First in the field before the reddening sun. 
 Last in the shadows when the day is done, 
 Line after line, along the bursting sod, 
 Marks the broad acres where his feet have trod; 
 Still where he treads, the stubborn clods divide. 
 The smooth, fresh furrow opens deep and wide; 
 Matted and dense the tangled turf upheaves, 
 Mellow and dark the ridgy cornfield cleaves; 
 Up the steep hillside, where the laboring train 
 Slants the long track that scores the level plain; 
 Through the moist valley, clogged with oozing clay. 
 The patient convoy breaks its destined way; 
 At every turn the loosening chains resound, 
 The swinging ploughshare circles glistening round, 
 Till the wide field one billowy waste appears, 
 And wearied hands unbind the panting steers. 
 
 These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings 
 The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings; 
 This is the page whose letters shall be seen 
 Changed by the sun to words of living green; 
 This is the scholar whose immortal pen 
 Spells the first lesson hunger taught to men; 
 These are the lines -which heaven-commanded Toil 
 Shows on his deed, — the charter of the soil! 
 
 O gracious Mother, whose benignant breast 
 Wakes us to life, and lulls us all to rest, 
 How thy sweet features, kind to every clime, 
 Mock with their smile the wrinkled front of time! 
 We stain thy flowers — they blossom o'er the dead; 
 We rend thy bosom, and it gives us bread; 
 O'er the red field that trampling strife has torn. 
 Waves the green plumage of thy tasselled corn; 
 Our maddening conflicts scar thy fairest plain. 
 Still thy soft answer is the growing grain. 
 Yet, O our Mother, while uncounted charms 
 Steal round our hearts in thine embracing arms 
 Let not our virtues in thy love decay. 
 And thy fond sweetness waste our strength away. 
 
 No! by these hills, whose banners now displayed 
 
 In blazing cohorts Autumn has arrayed; 
 
 By yon twin summits, on whose splintery crests 
 
 The tossing hemlocks hold the eagles' nest; 
 
 By these fair plains the mountain circle screens. 
 
74 
 
 And feeds with streamlets from its dark ravines, — 
 
 True to their home, these faithful arms shall toil 
 
 To crown with peace their own untainted soil; 
 
 And, true to God, to freedom, to mankind. 
 
 If her chained bandogs* Faction shall unbind, 
 
 These stately forms, that bending even now 
 
 Bowed their strong manhood to the humble plough. 
 
 Shall rise erect, the guardians of the land. 
 
 The same stern iron in the same right hand. 
 
 Till o'er the hills the shouts of triumph run. 
 
 The sword has rescued what the ploughshare won! 
 
 Herman Melville traveled 
 
 in many parts of the world 
 and had many strange adven- 
 tures, of which he wrote in- 
 teresting accounts. He wrote 
 novels and poems and was 
 well known as a lecturer. He 
 came to Pittsfield to live in 
 1848, and bought an old 
 farmhouse on Holmes Road 
 not verv far from the resi- 
 dence of Dr. Holmes. This 
 he named "Arrowhead," 
 from the pointed flint of an 
 Indian arrow that he picked 
 up in his field. This was his 
 home for many }ears and 
 here he wrote nearly all of his 
 later books. Mr. ^Melville and 
 i\ir. Hawthorne were inti- 
 mate friends. 
 
 HERMAN MELVILLE. 
 
 Hawthorne . . . was not social by nature. His acquaintances in 
 Lenox and thereabouts were few, and even among these he seldom took 
 the part of visitor. Among those who came to see him was the stately 
 Mr. James, the English historian and novelist, who lived down by Stock- 
 bridge on the road to Monument Mountain ... A more welcome vis- 
 itor was Herman Melville, — "Mr. Omoo," the children used to call him, — 
 a man of large Scotch build, bushy hair, and full, square cut beard. Of an 
 evening he used to ride over from Pittsfield on horseback to chat with 
 
 ♦Large and fierce (ii>j;s 
 
75 
 
 his Lenox friend. It would be difficult to find two men more unlike in 
 character. Melville ran away to sea in his youth on a whaling vessel, 
 and brought up in the Polynesian Islands. His experiences there gave 
 him material for two of his stories, "Typee" and "Omoo," both somewhat 
 Robinson Crusoe like in construction. Longfellow makes mention in his 
 diary of reading the former of these at Portland one evening, and of being 
 much interested in the author's glowing descriptions of life in the Mar- 
 quesas. The "Piazza Tales," written on the veranda of his home, facing 
 Greylock, and "October Mountain," half philosophy, half autumn tints, 
 exhiuiL more distinctly the Berkshire spirit. — From ""The Literary Asso- 
 ciations of Berkshire," by James T. Cutler. 
 
 Some miles brought me nigh the hills. 
 
 A winter wood road, matted all along with winter-green. By the side 
 of peujly waters — waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath swaying 
 fir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green in all, on I journeyed — 
 my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed with 
 vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep flume 
 clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies had, on 
 each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where Jacks-in- 
 the-puipit . . . preached but to the wildei-ness; on, where a huge, 
 cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed where, in forgotten times, man 
 after man had tried to split it, but lost his wedges for his pains — which 
 wedges yet rusted in their holes; on, where, ages past, in step-like ledges 
 of a cascade, skull-houow pots had been churned out by ceaseless whirl- 
 ing of a flint-stone — ever wearing, but itself unworn; on, by wild rapids 
 pouring into a secret pool, but soothed by circling there awhile, issued 
 forth serenely; on, to less broken ground, by a little ring, where, truly, 
 fairies must have danced, or else some wheel-tire been heated — for all 
 was bare; still on. and up, and out into a hanging orchard, where maid- 
 enly looked down upon me a crescent moon, from morning. 
 
 My horse hitched low his head. Red apples rolled before him; Eve's 
 apples; seek-no-furthers. He tasted one, I another; it tasted of the 
 ground. Fairy land not yet, thought I, flinging by bridle to a humped old 
 tree, that crooked out an arm to catch it. For the way now lay where 
 path was none, and none might go but by myself, and only go by daring. 
 Through blackberry brakes that tried to pluck me back, though I but 
 strained towards fruitless growths of mountain-laurel; up slippery steeps 
 to barren heights, w^here stood none to welcome. 
 
 Foot-sore enough and weary, I gained not then my journey's end, but 
 cf-me ere long to a craggy pass, dipping towards growing regions still 
 beyond. A zigzag road, half overgrown with ' blueberry bushes, here 
 turned among the cliffs. A rent was in their ragged sides; through it a 
 little track branched off, which, upwards threading that short defile, came 
 breezily out above, to where the. mountain-top, part sheltered northward, 
 by a tailer brother, sloped gently off a space, ere darkly plunging; and 
 
76 
 
 here, among fantastic rocks, reposing in a herd, the foot-track wound, 
 half beaten, up to a little, low-storied, grayish cottage, capped, nun-like, 
 
 with a peaked roof 
 
 No fence was seen, no inclosure. Near by — ferns, ferns, ferns; 
 further — woods, woods, woods; beyond — mountains, mountains, moun- 
 tains; then sky. sky, sky. Turned out in aerial commons, pasture for the 
 mountain moon. Nature, and but nature, house and all. — From "The 
 Piazza," one of the "'Piazza Tales" by Herman Melville. 
 
 Dr. John Todd, 
 
 for thirty years 
 pastor of the First 
 Church in Pitts- 
 field, was famous 
 as a preacher 
 and a writer. He 
 wrote a great 
 many very inter- 
 esting books that 
 were widely read 
 in the United 
 States and in oth- 
 er countries. Some 
 of these books 
 were written be- 
 fore he came to 
 Pittsfield, b u t 
 
 most of them 
 were written here. 
 Among his writ- 
 ings were "Lec- 
 DR. JOHN TODD. tures to Chil- 
 
 dren," "Student's Manual," "Truth Made Simple," "Simple 
 Sketches," "Summer Gleanings," and "Nuts for Boys to Crack." 
 
 We ha,ve just returned from dedicating our new Cemetery. It is of 
 very great extent. Solemn woods, sunny lawns, pleasant hills and dales, 
 and a singing stream, which, stopping once in its course, forms a beautiful 
 little lakelet, — all are found in our chosen resting-place for the dead. 
 Miles of smooth carriage-road wind among the hillocks and trees, and as 
 the stranger rides now in sunlight and now in shade, he confesses that no 
 expense has been spared, and that it is an honor to the town. But the 
 
77 
 
 Dedication. The morning was beautifully clear, and, as the thousands 
 gathered to move in procession, no banner or martial music disturbed the 
 solemnity of the occasion. The bell tolling, a single bass-drum beating 
 time to our footsteps, the procession, a mile in length, went forward to 
 the grounds. In one of the beautiful groves, and on the side of a hill, 
 the seats and the platform were arranged, and at least three thousand 
 sat down in silence. The exercises consisted of prayer, reading the Scrii> 
 tures, singing, addresses, and a sweet poem from a most gifted mind, — 
 Dr. Holmes. We seemed to be standing between the living and the dead. 
 
 We were drawn back to the past and connected with our fathers; for 
 we are to remove, as far as possible, all the dead who have been buried 
 in this town since its first settlement, and lay their bones here, to be 
 disturbed no more, we trust, till the resurrection day. 
 
 We were solemn, for we seemed to be looking into our own graves; 
 for though it is now "a new sepulchre wherein never man was yet laid," 
 yet we knew that the first graves would soon be opened, and that beneath 
 these lofty trees our own dust must shortly sleep. We were connected 
 with the future, for we knew that it would be at least two hundred, per- 
 haps five hundred years, before the dead will again call for more room. 
 We were doing what will not be again done here for centuries, and here 
 the dust of our children and of our posterity is to be gathered. And we 
 thought how we should then be centuries old ourselves, and through how 
 many strange scenes of thinking, feeling, hoping, fearing, suffering, and 
 enjoying, we should pass ere that day comes. — From "Summer Glemiings," 
 by John Todd. 
 
 Joseph E. A. Smith has written "The History of Pittsfield," 
 "Taghconic," and other books. 
 
 Lrreat as have been the changes which Onota has undergone, they 
 have affected its curious rather than its picturesque features; and its 
 beauty is increased instead of being impaired. From the hill upon its 
 south-western shore, which was fortified in the old French and Indian 
 wars, a greater number of fine views are afforded than perhaps from any 
 other spot of equal compass in Berkshire; and of these, the most pleasing 
 are those which embrace the lake and the mountains, which, beyond it, 
 stretch away to ever-present Greylock. — From "The History of Pittsfield," 
 by Joseph E. A. Smith. 
 
 Rose Terry Cooke spent the closing years of her Hfe in Pitts- 
 field. Her writings include "Happy Dodd," "No," "Steadfast," 
 two volumes of poems, and several collections of short stories. 
 
 A brook babbled down through the verdant cleft in the hills; you 
 could hear its distant fall over more than one dam, but its light and 
 shining were hidden by thick leaves, and by the flood of golden, dusty, 
 rgdiant mist that filled and overflowed all the valley from the fast-sinking 
 
78 
 
 sun. Now that day-star fell behind a dark blue slate cloud, and gilt its 
 edge with a vivid fringe of fire. Silence brooded over all the woods, brok- 
 en only now and then by the thrilling, vibrant, silver-smitten note of the 
 vood-tnrush, who sings at noon and night as if he disdained the song of 
 other oirds. . . . Then the sun emerged; the livid cloud was flecked 
 with cold crimson; pearl and golden scales of light dappled all the south- 
 ern sky in streaming fans of splendor. The east was filled with warm 
 rose tints flusning and fading, and deeper still the crimson grew, and 
 softer the purple of the west. A parting cloud of fire and gloom revealed 
 the high evening star; the sun was gone.— i^'rom "TTie Sphinx's Children," 
 bv Rose Terry Cooke. 
 
 Dr. William Wilberforce 
 Newton for eighteen years 
 rector of St. Stephen's 
 church, wrote a number of 
 books, including- both prose 
 and poetry. Among his writ- 
 ings are "Priest and Man," 
 "A Run Through Russia," 
 and "Phihp MacGregor." 
 
 Philip MacGregor and Lydia 
 Hamilton, his wife, had been 
 lovers from childhood, having 
 been brought up together in the 
 quiet country life of the Berk- 
 shire Hills, not many miles 
 away from the Queen City of 
 that beautiful mountain region. 
 As boy and girl they fished the 
 watei'S of Pontoosuc lake; mar- 
 veled at the wonderful Balance 
 Rock; climbed the tall dark 
 green hills which encompass 
 the city, "as the mountains stand about Jerusalem," and even from Pot- 
 ter mountain and Perry's Peak, in their romantic young life, saw, through 
 the mists which hang over the Hudson, the huge piles of the Catskills, 
 famed in Irving's story. On the near lakes, which enticed them by their 
 beauties, in the deep glen of Lulu Cascade, and up the embowered road- 
 side paths, Philip had performed for his fair companion many an act of 
 boyhood's heroism; pulling up pond lilies from their deep and danger- 
 ous watery beds, to deck her beauties, as fair and pure as they; or, bold- 
 ly facing the angry looks of some fierce bull, to gather her chestnuts. — 
 From "Philip MacGregor," by William Wilberfoi'ce Neioton, D. D. 
 
 DR. WILLIAM W. NEWTON. 
 
79 
 
 Among the Authors now Living in Pittsfield may be men- 
 tioned the following: Mrs. 11. M. I'lunkett, who has written "The 
 Life of Dr. J. G. Holland" and "Wumen, Plumbers and Doctors"; 
 Anna L. Dawes, author of "The Life of Charles Sumner," and 
 "How We are Governed ;" H. H. Uallard, librarian of the Berkshire 
 Athenaeum, author of "The World of Matter," and various text- 
 books and papers ; and William Stearns Davis, author of "A Friend 
 of Cjesar." 
 
 Henry W. Shaw who wrote under the name of Josh Billings, 
 was born in Lanesboro and was buried in the village cemetery there. 
 
 He has been called 
 "the queerest and 
 wisest of humorists." 
 "He was undoubted- 
 ly one of the quaint- 
 est writers of his 
 time, and . . . his 
 works . . . have 
 alTorded innocent 
 
 mirth for thou- 
 THE GRAVE OF JOSH BILLINGS. ^^^^^1^ -. ^ov several 
 
 years he published his sayings in what he called "Josh Billings's 
 Farmer's Allminax." He pretended to be very illiterate. 
 
 In Lanesboro, too, is the little stone schoolhouse where Horace 
 E. Scudder wrote the "Bodley Books." 
 
 The village ov New Ashford iz lokated in the state ov Massachusetts, 
 and iz about 150 miles west ov Plj^mouth rok. 
 
 It iz one ov them towns that don't make enny fuss, but for pure water, 
 pi^re morals, and good rye, and Injun bread, it stands on tiptoze. 
 
 It waz settled soon after the landing ov the pilgrims, bi sum ov 
 that party. 
 
 But, dear Mr. , i will now git back tew whare i am, and tell yu 
 
 sumthin about New Ashford. 
 
 If yu luv a mountain, cum up here and see me. 
 
 Right in front ov the little tavern, whare i am staying, rizes up a 
 chunk ov land, that will make yu feel weak tew look at it. 
 
 I hav bin on its top, and far above waz the brite blu ski, without a 
 kloud swimming in it, while belo me the rain shot slanting on the valley, 
 and the litening played its mad pranks. . . . 
 
80 
 
 But what a still place this New Ashford iz. 
 
 At sunrize the roosters crow all around, once apiece; at sunset the 
 cows cum hollering home tew be milked; and at twilite out steal the 
 krickets, with a song, the burden ov which seems sad and weary. 
 
 This iz all the racket thare iz in New Ashford. It iz so still here that 
 you can hear a feather drop from a blujay's tail. 
 
 Out ov this mountain, squeezed bi the weight ov it, leaks a little 
 brook ov water, and up and down this brook each day i loiter. . . . 
 
 The fust thing i do in the morning, when i git up iz tew go out and 
 look at the mountain, and see if it iz thare, if this mountain should go 
 away, how lonesum i should be. 
 
 Yesterday i picked one quart ov field strawberries, kaught 27 trout, 
 and gathered a whole parcell ov wintergreen leaves, a big daze work. 
 
 \\'nen i got home last night tired, no man kould hav bought them ov 
 me for 700 dollars, but i suppoze, after all, that it waz the tired that waz 
 wuth the munny. 
 
 Thare iz a grate deal ov raw bliss, in gifting tired. 
 
 Dear Mr. — — , good-bye, it iz now 9 oclk, P. M., and everything, in 
 New Ashford, iz fast asleep inkluding the krickets, I will just step out 
 and see if the mountain iz thare, and then 1 will go to bed too. — "New 
 Ashford," by Josh Billings. 
 
 / 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne came 
 from Salem to Berkshire for the 
 benefit of his health. He was an 
 author of wonderful romances. 
 One of his best known works is 
 "The Scarlet Letter." While in 
 Berkshire that famous author lived 
 in a little red house in Lenox. The 
 desk which he tised in that house 
 is still to be seen in the Berkshire 
 Athenaeum. During his stay here, 
 and probably on this desk, he 
 wrote "The House of Seven Ga- 
 bles," "A Wonder Book" ("Tang- 
 lewood Tales"), and here he 
 planned "The Blithedale Romance." "A Wonder Book" is a col- 
 lection of delightful stories for children. In the book Mr. Haw- 
 thorne's house is called "Tanglewood," and that is why the stories 
 are called "Tanglewood Tales." 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
81 
 
 Monument Mountain, to the southward, was still in the centre of the 
 scene, but seemed to have sunk and subsided, so that it was now but an 
 undistinguished member of a large family of hills. Beyond it, the Ta- 
 conic range looked higher and bulkier than before. Our pretty lake was 
 seen, with all its little bays and inlets; and not that alone, but two or 
 three new lakes were opening their blue eyes to the sun. Several white vil- 
 lages, each with its steeple, were scattered about in the distance. There 
 were so many farm-houses, with the acres of woodland, pasture, mowing- 
 fields, and tillage, that the children could hardly make room in their 
 minds to receive all these different objects. There, too, was Tanglewood, 
 which they had hitherto thought such an important apex of the world. 
 It now occupied so small a space, that they gazed far beyond it, and on 
 
 ■■^: fr' 
 
 HAWTHORNE'S "LITTLE RED HOUSE" IN LENOX. 
 ("Tanglewood.") 
 
 either side, and searched a good while with their eyes, before discovering 
 whereabout it stood. 
 
 White, fleecy clouds were hanging in the air, and threw the dark 
 spots of their shadow here and there over the landscape. But, by and by, 
 the sunshine was where the shadow had been, and the shadow was some- 
 where else. 
 
 Far to the westward was a range of blue mountains, which Eustace 
 Bright told the children were the Catskills. Among those misty hills, he 
 said, was a spot where some old Dutchmen were playing an everlasting 
 game of nine-pins, and where an idle fellow, whose name was Rip Van 
 Winkle, had fallen asleep, and slept twenty years at a stretch. The 
 children eagerly besought Eustace to tell them all about this wonderful 
 affair. But the student replied that the story had been told once already^ 
 and better than it ever could be told again. — From "Bald-Summit," intro- 
 ductory to "The Chimera" in "A Wonder-Book,'' by Nathaniel Hawthorne^ 
 
82 
 
 FANNY KEMBLB. 
 
 the latter is "Sketches of a Girlhood." 
 Berkshire Jubilee. She died in England 
 
 Fanny Kemble, a 
 
 famous actress, was one 
 of the first to admire the 
 natural beiauties of 
 Lenox. She built a cot- 
 tage there and spent her 
 leisure time there for 
 thirty years. She was 
 very fond of outdoor 
 life — riding, driving, and 
 fishing. She gave a 
 clock to the Congrega- 
 tional Church in Lenox. 
 She earned the money 
 for this by reading 
 Shakspere one evening. 
 She wrote many poems 
 and other books. Among 
 She read a poem at the 
 
 Grey- Lock, cloud girdled, from his purple throne, 
 
 A voice of welcome sends, 
 And from green sunny fields, a warbling tone 
 
 The Housatonic blends. 
 
 And on this air, there lingers yet the tone, 
 Of those last sacred words to freedom given, 
 
 The mightiest utterance of that sainted onef. 
 
 Whose spirit from these mountains soar'd to Heaven. 
 
 And may God guard thee, oh, thou lovely land! 
 
 Danger, nor evil, nigh thy borders come. 
 Green towers of freedom may thy hills still stand. 
 
 Still, be each valley, peace and virtue's home: 
 The stranger's grateful blessing rest on thee, 
 
 And firm as Heaven, be thy prosperity! 
 
 From "Ode, Written for the Berkshire Jubilee," by Mrs. Fanny Kem- 
 ble Butler, 18U- 
 
 + Dr. William Ellery Channing. 
 
83 
 
 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 God had gone through it, bearin 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher once 
 owned a farm in Lenox for a sum- 
 mer home. Me went there several 
 summers with his family. Mr. 
 Beecher was a Brooklyn minister 
 celebrated for his preaching and 
 his writings. Here he wrote his 
 famous "Star Papers." 
 
 JUNE! Rest! This is the year's 
 bower. Sit down within it. Wipe from 
 thy brow the toil. The elements are 
 thy servants. The dews bring the 
 jewels. The winds bring perfume. 
 The earth shows thee all her treasure. 
 The forests sing to thee. The air is 
 all sweetness, as if all the angels of 
 spices homeward. The storms are but 
 as flocks of mighty birds that spread their wings and sing in the high 
 heaven! Speak to God, now, and say, "0, Father, where art thou?" And 
 oui of every flower, and tree, and silver pool, and twined thicket, a voice 
 will come, "God is in me." The earth cries to the heavens, "God is here." 
 And the heavens cry to the earth, "God is here." The sea claims Him. 
 The land hath Him. His footsteps are upon the deep! He sitteth upon 
 the Circle of the Earth! — Froyn, '"The Death of Our Almanac,'" one of the 
 "Star Papers," by Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 Dr. William EUery Channing, 
 
 a Boston clergyman and writer, 
 spent several summers in Lenox to 
 improve his health. Among his 
 Lenox friends were Catharine 
 Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble. 
 Miss Sedgwick wrote a tribute to 
 him and read it at the Berkshire 
 Jubilee. 
 
 October 29th, ISoL— On a walk to 
 Scott's pond, with Ellery Channing, we 
 found a wild strawberry in the woods, 
 not quite ripe, but beginning to red- 
 den. For a week or two, the cider- 
 mills have been grinding apples. — 
 DR. WILLIAM E. CHANNING. Hawthorne's ''American Note-Books." 
 
84 
 
 I dedicate this address to the men and women of Berkshire. I have 
 found so much to delight me in the magnificent scenery of this region, 
 in its peaceful and prosperous villages, and in the rare intelligence and 
 virtues of the friends whose hospitality I have here enjoyed, that I desire 
 to connect this little work with this spot. I cannot soon forget the 
 beautiful nature and the generous spirits with which I had been privileged 
 to commune in the valley of the Housatonic. 
 
 Lienox, Mass., August 9, 1842. 
 . . . I feel as if the subject of this address peculiarly befitted this 
 spot. WTiere am I now pleading the cause and speaking the praises of 
 liberty? Not in crowded cities, where, amidst men's works and luxuries 
 and wild speculations and eager competitions for gain, the spirit of lib- 
 erty oicen languishes; but amidst towering mountains, embosoming peace- 
 ful vaies. Amidst these vast works of God the soul naturally goes forth, 
 and cannot endure the thought of a chain. Your free air, which we come 
 to in-^ale for health, breathes into us something better than health, even 
 a freer spirit. Mountains have always been famed for nourishing brave 
 
 souls and the love of liberty Men of Berkshire! whose nerves 
 
 and souls the mountain air has braced, you surely will respond to him 
 who speaks of the blessings of freedom and the misery of bondage. I 
 feel as if the feeble voice which now addresses you must find an echo 
 amidst these forest-crowned heights. Do they not impart something of 
 t'''eir own power and loftiness to men's souls? Should our Common- 
 wealth ever be invaded by victorious armies, freedom's last asylum would 
 be here. Here may a free spirit, may reverence for all human rights, 
 may sympathy for all the oppressed, may a stern, solemn purpose to give 
 no sanction to oppression, take stronger and stronger possession of men's 
 minds, and from these mountains may generous impulses spread far and 
 wide! — From ''An Address Delivered at Lenox, on the First of August, 
 18ff2, being the Anniversary of the Emancipation in the British West In- 
 dies," by William E. Charming, D. D. 
 
 Dr. Jonathan Edwards — In 
 the early days of Stockbridge, 
 there was a tribe of Indians Hving 
 there. Jonathan Edwards, a schol- 
 ar of unusual ability, came aniijtig 
 them to teach them how to save 
 their souls. The house where he 
 lived was torn down in 1900. It 
 was known as "Edwards Hail." 
 Here in a room about six by fifteen 
 he wrote his great works, "Free- 
 dom of the Will," "The Nature of 
 True Virtue," and "God's Last 
 End in Creation." His ancient 
 
 DR. JONATHAN EDWARDS. 
 
85 
 
 study table stands in the village library ; while near the church green 
 his descendants have erected a monument to his memory. He left 
 Stockbridge to become president of Princeton College in New 
 Jersey, where he died soon after. 
 
 Four generations ago, Rev. Jonathan Edwards came across the hills 
 from Northampton, with his wife, Sarah Pierrepont Edwards, and their 
 ten children, to take charge of the little church of mingled whites and 
 Indians located on this spot. . . . 
 
 . . . Yonder on the main street stands the house which he and his 
 family occupied during their entire residence in Stockbridge, much of it 
 comparatively unchanged. Its present occupants will gladly receive you; 
 and they can show you, among other things, the room, and the very spot in 
 it, where the great man sat when he penned his treatises on "The Freedom 
 of the Will," "The Nature of Virtue," and "Original Sin." A few yards 
 north-east of this place where we are gathered stood the old Indian meet- 
 ing house where he preached. ... In yonder burial-place lies the 
 dust of Mr. Edward's immediate predecessor, the first missionary to the 
 Indians, and first pastor of this church, — Rev. John Sergeant: a sacred 
 spot, which he must have often visited. There, too, lie many of the flock 
 to whom be ministered, as well as the good and great men who immedi- 
 ately succeeded him here, — Dr. Stephen West and Dr. David 
 Dudley Field. At a little distance west of here, and overlooking the 
 meadows, is the Indian burying-ground. ... I hardly need to point 
 to these graceful hills and meadows, and this beautiful winding river. 
 His eyes must have often rested upon them in a way to kindle anew con- 
 templations of "the sweet glory of God," which xoas ever revealed to him 
 in such things. — From remarks of Rev. Elias Cornelius Hookei; at Ed- 
 \oards Family Meeting, Stockbridge, September 1810. 
 
 There a.re some things that I have happily seen of the wondrous way of 
 the working of the spider. . . . Everybody that is used to the country 
 knows their marching in the air from one tree to another, sometimes to 
 the distance of five or six rods. Nor can one go out in a dewy morning 
 in the latter end of August and the beginning of September but he shall 
 see multitudes of webs, made visible by the dew that hangs on them, 
 reaching from one tree, branch, or shrub, to another: which webs are 
 ccmmonly thought to be made in the night, because they appear only in 
 the morning; whereas none of them are made in the night, as these spid- 
 ers never come out in the night when it is dark, as the dew is then falling. 
 But these webs may be seen well enough in the day-time by an observing 
 eye, by their reflection in the sunbeams. Especially late in the afternoon 
 may these webs that are between the eye and that part of the horizon that 
 Is under the sun, be seen very plainly. . . . And the spiders themselves 
 may be very often seen traveling in the air, from one stage to another 
 amongst the trees, in a very unaccountable manner. But I have often 
 seen tnat which is much more astonishing. In very calm and serene days 
 
86 
 
 '^ 
 
 in the forementioned ^lUie of year, standing at some distance behind the 
 end of a house or some other opaque body, so as just to hide the disk 
 of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays, and looking along close by the 
 side of it, I have seen a vast multitude of little shining webs and glisten- 
 ing strings brightly reflecting the sunbeams, and some of them of great 
 Ipngiii, and of such a height that one would think they were tacked to 
 the vault of the heavens. — Written by Jonathan Edwards when he was 
 about twelve years old. 
 
 Cath arine Maria 
 Sedgwick, the first Ameri- 
 can literary woman of her 
 day, was born in Stock- 
 bridge. Many of the beau- 
 ties of Berkshire are 
 charmingly described in 
 her works. She also des- 
 cribes early New England 
 life. Aaiiong her best 
 known books are "The 
 Linwoods" and "Hope 
 Leslie." She lies buried 
 in the beautiful Sedgwick 
 enclosure in the Stock- 
 bridge cemetery. 
 
 . . . At length, at the 
 close of the third day, after 
 
 having gradually descended 
 
 CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK. Eor several miles, the hills on 
 ore side receded, and left a little interval of meadow, through which 
 they wound into the lower valley of the Housatonic. ... As the fu- 
 gitives emerged from the narrow defile, a new scene opened upon them; 
 a scene of valley and hill, river and meadow, surrounded by mountains, 
 whose encircling embrace expressed protection and love to the gentle 
 spirits of the valley. . . . 
 
 The gentle Housatonic wound through the depths of the valley, in 
 some parts contracted to a narrow channel, and murmuring over the 
 rocks that rippled its surface, and in others spreading wide its clear 
 mirror, and lingering like a lover amid the vines, trees, and flowers 
 that fringe its banks. Thus it flows now; but not, as then, in the sylvan 
 freedom of Nature, when no clattering mills and bustling factories threw 
 their prosaic shadows over the silver water; when not even a bridge 
 spanned their bosom; when not a trace of man's art was seen, save the 
 
87 
 
 little bark canoe that glided over them, or lay idly moored along the 
 shore. . . They had entered the expanded vale by following the windings 
 of the Housatonic around a hill,* coni.cal and easy of ascent, excepting on 
 that side which overlooked the river, where, half way from the base to the 
 summit, rose a perpendicular rock, bearing on its beetling front the age 
 of centuries. On every other side the hill was garlanded with laurels, now 
 in full and profuse bloom, here and there surmounted by an intervening 
 pine, spruce, or hemlock, whose seased winter foliage was fringed with 
 the bright, tender sprouts of spring. . . . 
 
 The lower valley of the Housatonic, at the period to which our history 
 refers,- was inhabited by a peaceful, and, as far as that epithet could ever 
 be applied to our savages, an agricultural tribe, whose territory, situate 
 midway between the Hudson and the Connecticut, was bounded and 
 defended on each side by mountains then deemed impracticable to a 
 foe. . . . 
 
 The villagef was on a level, sandy plain, extending for about half a 
 mile, and raised by a natural and almost perdendicular bank fifty feet 
 above the level of the meadows. At one extremity of the plain was the hill 
 we have described; the other was terminated by a broad green, appropri- 
 ated to sports and councils. 
 
 The huts of the savages were irregularly scattered over the plain; 
 some on cleared ground, and others just peeping out of copses of pine 
 trees; some on the very verge of the plain, overlooking the meadows, and 
 others under the shelter of a high hill that formed the northern boundary 
 of the valley, and seemed stationed there to defend the inhabitants from 
 their natural enemies, cold and wind. 
 
 The huts were the simplest structures of human art; but, as in no 
 natural condition of society a perfect equality obtains, some were more 
 spacious and commodious than others. All were made with flexible poles, 
 firmly set in the ground, and drawn and attached together at the lop. 
 Those of the more indolent or least skilful were filled in with branches of 
 trees and hung over with coarse mats, while those of the better order were 
 neatly covered with bark, prepared with art and considerable labour for 
 the purpose. Little garden patches adjoined a few of the dwellings, and 
 were planted with beans, pumpkins, and squashes; the seeds of these 
 vegetables, according to an Indian tradition, . . . having been sent 
 to them in tae bill of a bird from the southwest by the Great Spirit. . . . 
 
 This village, as we have described it, and perhaps from the affection 
 its natural, beauty inspired, remained the residence of the savages long 
 after tney had vanished from the surrounding country. Within the mem- 
 ory of the present generation the remnant of the tribe migrated to the 
 West; and even now some of their families make a summer pilgrimage to 
 this their Jerusalem, and are regardedwith a melancholy interest by the 
 
 * Laurel Hill in StockbridRe. 
 
 t The village of the Stockbridge Indians, en the site of the present village of Stockbridge 
 
present occupants of the soil. — From '"Hope Leslie,'' hy Catharine M.Sedg- 
 toick. 
 
 Mr. David Dudley Field, a former Stockbridge minister, was 
 the author of several histories of places near Stockbridge, among 
 which was a "History of Pittsfield." He prepared a "History of 
 Berkshire County," which was published in 1829. 
 
 The residence of Capt. Konlvapot in this town, the principal naan 
 among the Indians when the mission was commenced, has been mentioned. 
 King Ben, (Benjamin Kokkewenaunaut) had a house on the elevated 
 ground back from the Housatonic, half a mile west of the Plain. In 1771, 
 being then 94 years old, this man said to the Indians that they must 
 appoint another king, and king Solomon (Solomon Unhaunnauwaunnutt) 
 was chosen his successor. Solomon's house was on the south bank of the 
 Housatonic, opposite "Little Hill." He died in Feb., 1777, aged about 50. 
 King Ben lived until April, 1781, being 104 years old. Some of the Indian 
 houses were on the Plain, some on the meadows near the river, and a few 
 about Barnum's brook. There is no evidence that they ever resided in 
 West Stockbridge in any considerable numbers. . . , 
 
 Though these Indians were at first called River Indians by the Eng- 
 lish, they were afterwards more generally denominated Plousatonic In- 
 dians, until the incorporation of this town. Since that time they have been 
 commonly called Stockbridge Indians. They have also sometimes . . . 
 been called Mohegans, which is a corruption of their proper name, Muh- 
 hekaneews , . . which as interperated by themselves, signifies, "The 
 people of the great waters, continually in motion." . . . 
 
 . . . They performed numerous kind offices for the early settlers 
 o^ this County and for others who passed through it, acting as their guides 
 ard interpreters. In time of war they were spies for the English, and 
 often fought, and sometimes shed their blood in their armies. Though 
 Fort Massachusetts was repeatedly attacked in the time of the first French 
 War,* and terror was siDread through all this region; though Mr. Sergeant's 
 house was garrisoned and perhaps some others in the town, yet in consC" 
 quence, as it was supposed at the time, of the well known friendship of 
 the iviuhhekaneews, no hostile Indians ventured down into the vicinity of 
 this place, and the southern section of the County was saved from such 
 calamities as befel some of the settlements on Connecticut river, and 
 others to the west in the State of N. Y. And though in the second French 
 war the few families in Williamstown, Lanesborough and Pittsfield were 
 difturbed, and though in one instance, in 1754, as it is generally stated, 
 but in the summer of 1755, as the time is given by the Rev. Mr. Taylor, 
 
 * In U)89 began a lonis: struggle between the Enzlish and the French, aided by the Indians, 
 for possession of America. The first war, generally called King William's War, la«ted from 
 1689 to 1697. The second war, called Queen Anne's War. lasted from 1703 t'l 1713. The third 
 war, King George's War, "was waged from 1744 to 1748. The fourth war, known as the French 
 and Indian War, lasted from 1754 to 1763. 
 
89 
 
 in his appendix to the Redeemed Captive, a small party came into the 
 centre of the County, two of which attacked a family in Stockbridge; yet 
 the mischief was little, compared with what probably would have been 
 done, had it not been for the friendship of the Stockbridge tribe. There 
 was indeed a suspicion for a time that they were in some way concerned 
 in this attack. But of this proof was wanting. — From "A History of the 
 Town of Stockbridge, '' by Rev. David D. Field, in "A History of the Couvr 
 ty of Berkshire," loritten by gentlemen in the County, 1829. 
 
 Four sons of Mr. David 
 Dudley Field have become 
 noted, and have made his 
 family one of the most fa- 
 mous in the United States. 
 David Dudley Field was a 
 great lawyer and did much to 
 improve the practice of law 
 in New York and other 
 states. The "Field Codes" 
 were intended to make the 
 laws plainer and simpler than 
 they had been before. Stephen 
 J. Field became Chief Justice 
 of California and afterwards 
 one of the justices of the 
 United States Supreme 
 Court. Cyrus W. Field, 
 born in Stockbridge, was a 
 successful business man. 
 After gaining a fortune he 
 
 CYRUS W. FIELD. 
 
 planned a telegraphic cable under the Atlantic Ocean to connect 
 America and Europe. After many discouragements and failures, 
 the cable was finally laid and the first public message was sent 
 over it in 1858. Dr. Hoiry M. Field, born in Stockbridge, became 
 a well-known writer and editor. He was also a great traveler. He 
 has written "A History of the Atlantic Telegraph," "From Egypt 
 to Japan," "Among the Holy Hills," and other books. 
 
 . . . Here is Berkshire . . . You may go to the farthest east 
 or to the farthest west without finding anything fairer; nay, I am tempted 
 to add, without finding anything so fair. We have not indeed the grand 
 scenery of the Alps, nor the broad feaatures of our Pacific dominion; but 
 
90 
 
 we have scenery soft, and yet wild, of mountain and valley in infinite 
 variety, and so bathed in sunlight and shadow as to give us from morning 
 to night an ever-shifting landscape. You may come with the apple-blos- 
 soms, when the trees are white as if sprinkled with perfumed snow; you 
 may come in June, when the dawn is musical with birds, and in the long 
 receding twilight there falls upon the earth a peace like the peace of God; 
 you may come in the summer noon, when the sun's heat, tempered by 
 mountain-air, falls softly upon meadow and river; you may come in mid- 
 October, when the woods are green and red and gold; you may come in 
 winter, when the whole earth is dazzling white, and the branches of the 
 trees are silvered with ice, and when a purple light foreruns the sun at 
 morning, and pursues him at evening; you may come and abide at any of 
 these seasons, and you will say with me, that, of all the beautiful places 
 you have known, this is the most perfect in beauty. — From remarks by 
 Hon. David Dudley Field, at the Edwards Family Meeting, at Siockbridge, 
 September, 1870. 
 
 . . . A hundred and forty years ago, this was but a hamlet on the 
 borders of the wilderness, — the seat of a small tribe of Indians. A few 
 white men from the Connecticut Valley, venturing over the mountains, 
 came down into this peaceful spot. When once they had formed a little 
 settlement, their first want was a minister; and hither came, in answer 
 to their call, John Sergeant, a tutor in Yale College; a man whose looks 
 were those of the scholar, but who, like Eliot and Brainerd, willingly 
 banished himself to the wilderness to preach the gospel to the children 
 of the forest. His culture and refinement were not lost even upon them. 
 They soon recognized in him a man of God, and satat his feet; and when, 
 after a ministry of fourteen years, he was borne to his rest in yonder 
 graveyard, it was amid the weeping of the simple natives, who desired, 
 when they should be buried, to be laid near him, that they might rise at 
 his side at the resurrection. — ^From an address by Rev. H. M. Field, D. D., 
 at the Edwards Family Meeting, isio. 
 
 Dr. Mark Hopkins was born in Great Barrington in "Cherry 
 Cottage." He wrote "The OtitHne Study of Man" and many other 
 books. For more than thirty years he was president of Williams 
 College in Williamstown. 
 
 In speaking of Edwards as related to Stockbridge, it is pleasing to 
 notice, that, as a great man, he does not stand alone. For a town no 
 larger than this, there have been and a.re connected with it, by residence 
 or birth, an unusual number of those whose names will live in history. 
 In the same line with Edwards, West and Field were great men, and 
 were worthy of the tablets in this church by which they are commemo- 
 rated in connection with him. In another line are the names of Judge 
 Sedgwick, and Miss Catharine Sedgwick, and Mrs. Theodore Sedgwick. 
 We have also among the living a codifier of laws, the most eminent of 
 
91 
 
 this age*; a judge of the Supreme Court of the United Statesf; and still 
 another + whose name will be remembered as long as the swift messages 
 of the telegraph shall make the ocean-bed their highway, and shall out- 
 run the sun in his course. At the head of these, Edwards stands the 
 greatest of all ... ; not great before God (for that no man can be,) 
 but great as walking humbly with him. — From Address by Rev. Mark 
 Hopkins. D. D.. L L. D., at the Edioards Family Meeting at Stockbridge, 
 Scpiemher. ISIO. 
 
 In 1814 William 
 Cullen Bryant, then 
 a youth of twenty, 
 came from Ciim- 
 mington, his native 
 place, to commence 
 law practice at Great 
 Barrington. "Thana- 
 topsis" had already 
 been written at Cum- 
 mington, and was 
 later published in tho 
 North American Re- 
 view, exciting gener 
 al admiration. About 
 this time "To a 
 Water-fowl," Monu- 
 ment Mountain," 
 "T he R i V u 1 e t," 
 "March," and "xA.ti- 
 tumn Woods" were 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. ^^jg^ produced. Bry- 
 ant was town clerk in Great Barrington for several years, and the 
 records in his handwriting are preserved. 
 
 In 1825, he gave up the law and removed to New York to 
 engage in news])aper work. The years which he passed in Great 
 Barrington must have made a deep impression upon him, for he 
 was Nature's poet. Here Nature spreads out her fairest pictures — 
 wild mountains, dark glens, woods, flowers, and sparkling brooks. 
 
 * Hon. David Dudley Field. 
 
 t Justice Stephen J. Field. » 
 
 X Cyrus W. Field. 
 
92 
 
 Around the place are also the scenes of many Indian legends. 
 One of these forms the subject of his poem entitled "Monument 
 Mountain," from which the following descriptions are taken. 
 
 Thou who wouldst see the lovely and the wild 
 
 Mingled in harmony on Nature's face, 
 
 Ascend our rocky mountains. Let thy foot 
 
 Fail not with weariness, for on their tops 
 
 The beauty and the majesty of earth 
 
 Spread wide beneath, shall make thee to forget 
 
 The steep and toilsome way. There, as thou stand'st. 
 
 The haunts of men below thee, and around 
 
 The mountain-summits, thy expanding heart 
 
 Shall feel a kindred with that loftier world 
 
 To which thou art translated, and partake 
 
 The enlargement of thy vision. Thou shalt look 
 
 Upon the green and rolling forest-tops. 
 
 And down into the secrets of the glens 
 
 And streams that with their bordering thickets strive 
 
 To hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze at once 
 
 Here on white villages, and tilth, and herds. 
 
 And swarming roads, and there on solitudes 
 
 That only hear the torrent, and the wind, 
 
 And eagle's shriek. There is a precipice 
 
 That seems a fragment of some mighty wall, 
 
 Built by the hand that fashioned the old world. 
 
 To separate its nations, and thrown down 
 
 When the flood dro\Vned them. To the north, a path 
 
 Conducts you up the narrow battlement. 
 
 Steep is the western side, shaggy and wild 
 
 With mossy trees, and pinnacles of flint, " 
 
 And many a hanging crag. But, to the east. 
 
 Sheer to the vale go down the bare old cliffs — 
 
 Huge pillars, that in middle heaven upbear 
 
 Their weather-beaten capitals, here dark 
 
 With moss, the growth of centuries, and there' 
 
 Of chalky whiteness where the thunderbolt 
 
 Has splintered them. It is a fearful thing 
 
 To stand upon the beetling verge, and see 
 
 Where storm and lightning, from that huge gray wall 
 
 Have tumbled down vast blocks, and at the base 
 
 Dashed them in fragments, and to lay thine ear 
 
 Over the dizzy depth, and hear the sound 
 
 Of winds, that struggle with the woods below, 
 
 Come up like ocean-murmurs. But the scene 
 
93 
 
 Is lovely round; a beautiful river there 
 
 Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads, 
 
 The paradise he made unto himself, 
 
 Mining the soil for ages. On each side 
 
 The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond, 
 
 Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise 
 
 The mountain-columns with which earth props heaven. 
 
 Dr. Orville Dewey, a great 
 Unitarian preacher, was born in 
 Sheffield and spent the closing 
 years of his life there, at his home 
 which he named St. David's. His 
 daughter, Miss Mary E. Dewey, 
 wrote the life of Catharine Sedg- 
 wick. 
 
 I was born in SheflBeld, Mass., on 
 the 28th of March, 1794. My grand- 
 parents, Stephen Dewey and Aaron 
 Root, were among the early settlers 
 of the town. . . . 
 
 . . . Besides the usual life of a 
 child in the country, .... I 
 remember nothing till the first event 
 in my early childhood, and that was 
 acting in a play. It was performed in 
 the church, as a part of a school exhi- 
 bition. The stage was laid upon the pews, and the audience seated in 
 the gallery. I must have been about five years old then, and I acted the 
 part of a little son. ... We are apt to think of the Puritan times 
 as all rigor and strictness. And yet here, nearly 60 years ago, was a 
 play acted in the meeting-house: the church turned into a theatre. And 
 I remember my mother's telling me that when she was a girl her father 
 carried her on a pillion to the raising of a church in Pittsfield; and the 
 
 occasion was celebrated by a ball in the evening 
 
 The next thing that I remember, as an event in my childhood, was 
 the funeral of General Ashley, one of our townsmen, who h«d served 
 as colonel, I think, in the War of the Revolution. I was then in my 
 sixth year. It was a military funeral; and the procession, for a long 
 distance, filled the wide street. The music, the solemn march, the bier 
 borne in the midst, the crowd! — it seemed to me as if the whole world 
 was at a funeral. . . . 
 
 ... I remember the time when I really feared that if I went out 
 into the fields to walk on Sunday, bears would come down from the 
 mountain and catch me. . . . What mistaken notions of life, of the 
 
 ORVILLE DEWEY. 
 
94 
 
 world, — the great, gay, garish world, all full of cloud-castles, ships laden 
 with gold, pleasures endless and entrancing! What mistaken impres- 
 sions about nature; about the material world upon which childhood has 
 alighted, and of which it must necessarily be ignorant; about clouds and 
 storms and tempests; and of the heavens above, sun and moon and stars! 
 For books to read, the old Sheffield Library was my main resource. 
 It consisted of about two hundred volumes, — books of the good old 
 fashion, well printed, well bound in calf, and well thumbed too. What 
 a treasure was there for me! I thought the mine could never be ex- 
 hausted. At least, it contained all that I wanted then, and better read- 
 ing, I think, than that which generally engages our youth nowadays,— 
 the great English classics in prose and verse, Addison and Johnson and 
 Milton and Shakespeare, histories, travels, and a few novels. The most 
 of these books I read, some of them over and over, often by torchlight, 
 sitting on the floor (for we had a rich bed of old pine-knots on the 
 farm); and to this library I owe more than to anything that helped me 
 in my boyhood. ... I remember the time when there were eminent 
 men in Sheffield. Judge Sedgwick commenced the practice of the law 
 here; and there were Esquire Lee, and John W. Hurlbut, and later, 
 Charles Dewey, and a number of professional men besides, and several 
 others who were not professional, but readers, and could quote Johnson 
 and Pope and Shakespeare; my father himself could repeat the "Essay 
 on Man," and whole books of the "Paradise Lost." — From "The Auto- 
 biography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D. D." 
 
 Richard Watson Gilder, who is the editor of the "Century 
 Magazine" and has written many beautiful poems, has a summer 
 home in Tyringham. The following is one of the poems he has 
 written about Berkshire County. 
 
 A RHYME OF TYRINGHAM. 
 Down in the meadow and up on the height » 
 
 The breezes are blowing the billows white. 
 In the elms and maples the robins call, 
 And the great black crows sail over all 
 
 In Tyringham, Tyringham Valley. 
 
 The river winds through the trees and the brake 
 And the meadow-grass like a shining snake; 
 • And low in the summer and loud in the spring 
 The rapids and reaches murmur and sing 
 
 In Tyringham, Tyringham Valley. 
 
 In the shadowy pools the trout are shy. 
 So creep to the bank and cast the fly! 
 What thrills and tremors the tense cords stir 
 When the trout it strikes with a tug and whir 
 In Tyringham, Tyringham Valley! 
 
95 
 
 At dark of the day the mist spreads white, 
 
 Like a magic lake in the glimmering light; 
 
 Or the winds from the meadow the white mists blow. 
 
 And the fireflies glitter— a sky below — 
 
 In Tyringham, Tyringham Valley. 
 And oh, in the windy days of the fall 
 The maples and elms are scarlet all, 
 And the world that was green is gold and red, 
 And with huskings and cider they're late to bed 
 
 In Tyringham. Tyringham Valley! 
 Now squirrel and partridge and hawk and hare 
 And wild-cat and woodchuck and fox beware! 
 The three days' hunt is waxing warm 
 For the count-up dinner at Riverside Farm 
 
 In Tyringham, Tyringham Valley. 
 The meadow ice will be freezing soon. 
 And then for a skate by the light of the moon. 
 So pile the wood on the hearth, my boy! 
 Winter is coming! I wish you joy 
 By the light of the hearth and the moon, my boy, 
 
 In Tyringham, Tyringham Valley! 
 
 DORA READ GOODALE. ELAINE GOODALE. 
 
 Elaine and Dora Qoodale, —At Sky farm at the North end 
 of Mt. Washington, on the top of the long ascent from Gtiilder 
 Hollow, lived Elaine and Dora Read Goodale. They are known as 
 the "Skv Farm poets." Thev began to wTite poetry when they 
 
96 
 
 were only nine years old, and a few years later they published 
 together a little volume of poems called "Apple Blossoms." "In 
 Berkshire with the Wild Flowers," "All Round the Year," and 
 "Verses from Sky Farm," quickly followed each other. Elaine 
 Goodale obtained a position in a government school for Indians in 
 South Dakota, and was afterwards appointed superintendent of all 
 the Indian schools in that state. She married Dr. Kastman, an 
 Indian, and lived in Minnesota. 
 
 A WELCOME TO BERKSHIRE. 
 
 From the city's sultry heat, 
 Ceaseless noise, and tread of feet, 
 From its close, oppressive air. 
 Life and turmoil everywhere, 
 Welcome to the cooling breath 
 Of the wind, the trees beneath; 
 Welcome to the earth's large room. 
 In her fullest summer bloom! 
 Woodlands deep and cool and green, 
 Laurels glowing red between; 
 Bees that hum, and birds that sing. 
 Fields with daisies whitening; 
 Fragrance sweet, and m,usic free, 
 'Tis to these we welcome thee! 
 
 'Neath the city's scorching sun, 
 Each can only think of one; 
 Here, from all the world apart, 
 Heart shall closely cling to heart. 
 Welcome to the hills and glades, 
 Vv eicome to the sun and shades. 
 But to loving hearts and free 
 Most of all we welcome thee! 
 
 Dora Read Goodale. 
 
 THE LONGING HOUR. 
 
 Old Berkshire — her name makes the gentle tear drops start — 
 
 Fond nurse of my childhood, dear home of my heart! 
 
 No scene so familiar, no landscape so kind 
 
 As to blur that first picture graved deep on the mind. 
 
 When fancy ran wild with her riotous brood, 
 
 And mystery lurked in the unexplored wood. 
 
 When the rill gushed a torrent, the rock towered so high, 
 
 And the child world was bounded by mountain and sky! 
 
97 
 
 Youth leaves us — Work beckons — reluctance is vain. 
 And the child of the hill-top descends to the plain, 
 Yet, no matter how sweetly life's voices are blent, 
 There are moments that stir with a vague discontent; 
 There are rare, lonely hours when he hears in his dreams 
 Her breeze-burdened pines and her free flowing streams; 
 When a blessed mirage in the distance he sees — 
 Her fair sloping meadows, her many-armed trees! 
 
 Then, Beautiful Berkshire, whatever his lot. 
 Its hopes, and its cares, and its joys are forgot, 
 And the pilgrim, the exile, whoever he be, 
 Turns fondly once more to his childhood and thee! 
 
 Elaine Goodale Eastman. 
 
 In New York City there has been built a "Hall of Fame," in 
 which are to be placed the names of the most famous persons born 
 in this country. Twenty-nine names have been selected. Of these 
 twenty-nine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the tenth, Jona- 
 than Edwards was the twelfth, Nathaniel Hawthorne was the 
 sixteenth, Henry Ward Beecher was the twenty-third, and William 
 Ellery Channing was the twenty-seventh. 
 
 We have told but in part the tale these Berkshire Hills might unfold 
 had they but tongues. There are others identified with Berkshire de- 
 serving place here as worthily as some mentioned. A noble race of men 
 and women have been fostered here. . . . There has been plain living 
 and high thinking in Berkshire. Nature has set this region apart; 
 especially in the past. In isolation, one must think, if he works at all; 
 in Berkshire one must look up if he looks at all, so high on every hand 
 is the horizon. 
 
 Let him who loves form or who loves color wend his way to Berk- 
 shire when the snow drifts over the fences and bows the birches to earth; 
 or in the young spring when the buds are swelling, and the birds arriv- 
 ing; or best of all in the golden autumn, when the country as far as the 
 eye can reach is aflame with scarlet and gold. ... 
 
 . . . At any season, and by night as well as by day, these moun- 
 tains and, lovelier still, the low-lying hills, appeal to the emotions of the 
 visitor. Whatever is beautiful to the eye of man becomes doubly dear 
 by association; form and color, thus enriched, enter the realm of the 
 ideal. Like beauty of character shining through features already lovely 
 are these Berkshire associations, dealing with men and women of whom 
 our nation and our literature are proud. . . . Berkshire will surely 
 continue in the future to multiply her literary associations. — From "The 
 Literary Associations of Berkshire," by James Tucker Cutler, "New Eng- 
 land Magazine," September, 1S93. 
 
98 
 
 X. 
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 Settlement. — The first settler in what was afterwards called 
 Berkshire County was Obadiah Noble, who came from Westfield in 
 1725 and settled in what is now the town of Sheffield, bringing his 
 sixteen-year-old daughter the next year to share his new home 
 with him. Soon afterward other settlers came in, and from that 
 time forward the new settlements in Berkshire slowly increased in 
 size and number. 
 
 PLAN OF THE TOWNSHIP OF PONTOOSUCK (PITTSFIELD), 1752. 
 
 (A, Large Mountain; B, M, Large Brooks; E, P, Small Brooks; C, F, K, Points 
 Mountains ; D, Top of the Mountain r G, Road ; U, Stockbridge Road ; I, S. River 
 of 9,000 acres ; O. Northampton Road ; X. Mountain Land from here to the River ; 
 Pond.) 
 
 at bases of 
 ; L, Corner 
 *, A Large 
 
99 
 
 FORT ANSON. F re n c h and Indian 
 
 (Built by William Williams, September,1774.) Wars. — Canada then be- 
 longed to France and this 
 part of the country be- 
 longed to England. Dis- 
 putes arose between them, 
 and these led to the 
 "French and Indian Wars." 
 During these wars several 
 forts were built in Berk- 
 shire County, among them 
 being Fort Massachusetts 
 GROUND PLAN. in North Adams, and Fort 
 
 (A. House; B, Storehouse; C. Well; D, Extension for Anson, Fort Fairfield, and 
 defending Wall F; E, G, Walls; H, II, Large Sills; I, I, Yq^\_ Ashlev in Pittsfield. 
 
 Fort Anson was located 
 near where Beaver Street 
 crosses the east branch of 
 the Housatonic River, 
 about on the site of the 
 cobble-stone' residence of 
 Mr. Robert Rice. Fort 
 Fairfield was on Holmes 
 Road between the Sampson 
 residence and the Housa- 
 tonic River. Fort Ashley 
 was southwest of Onota 
 Lake on the hill now occu- 
 pied by the Daniels res- 
 idence. In 1746 Fort 
 Massachusetts was surren- 
 
 K. K, Large Pillars; L, L, Yard.) 
 
 SOUTH VIEW. 
 (X, X, Ends of the House.) 
 
 h 
 
 F 
 
 A 
 
 B 
 
 iil = 1; 
 
 B 
 
 r 
 
 C 
 
 " r 
 
 EAST AND WEST SECTION. 
 
 (A, A, Pillars; B.B. Platform, eight feet wide, around r t- 1 
 
 the House ; C. C, Pillars ; D, Lower part of House ; E, dcrcd tO an army Of t rench 
 Soldiers' Lodging-Room ; F, Space ; G, Yard ; H. Store, ^j^^j Indians On aCCOUUt of 
 room ; K, K, Doors out of which soldiera might run to 
 protect every part of the House.) lllness among the SOldlCrS 
 
 and lack of ammunition. 
 The fort was destroyed and many of the soldiers were made prison- 
 ers and taken to Canada. They were kindly treated, but many died 
 on the way. The next year Fort Massachusetts was rebuilt. 
 
 L.ofC. 
 
100 
 
 Division of Hampshire County — The old county of Hamp- 
 shire included the present counties of Franklin, Hampshire, 
 Hampden, and Berkshire. In 1761 it was divided and the western 
 portion took the name of Berkshire County. Since then many 
 changes have been made in Berkshire's eastern and western bound- 
 aries. At that time the Dutch, who had settled in what is now 
 New York State, claimed all the land now belonging to Berkshire 
 County west oi the Housatonic River. When, in 1787, the present 
 boundary line between the states of Massachusetts and New York 
 was established, a large strip was taken from the western side of 
 Hancock and given to New York. 
 
 County Seat. — At first courts were held alternately at Great 
 Harrington, then the shire town, and at Pittsfield. In 1787 Lenox 
 became the shire town of the county, remaining so until 1868, when 
 Pittsfield was made, as it has since remained, the county seat. 
 
 H.E MEAD DEL. 
 
 MAP OF PITTSFIELD IN 1794. 
 
 Pittsfield, then called Poontoosuck, was settled in 1743, in 
 the western and eastern parts of the town. Mrs. Sarah Deming,. 
 
101 
 
 the first white woman in Pittsfield, lived in the eastern part of the 
 town and is buried there, a marble monument marking her grave.* 
 The township of Poontoosuck was called Pittsfield in honor of 
 William Pitt, who had done much for western Massachusetts in 
 the French and Indian War, Its population by the United States 
 Census of 1900 was 21,776. 
 
 Opposition to Unjust Taxation.— July 6, 1774, just before the 
 breaking out of the Revolutionary War, the people of the county 
 sent delegates to a convention which met at Stockbridge. At this 
 convention it was voted to advise the inhabitants not to buy tea and 
 other goods that came from England. This was because the 
 mother country, as England was called, had imposed what the 
 colonists considered an unjust tax upon several articles imported 
 into this country from England. 
 
 WHEREAS the Parliament of Great Britain have, of late, undertaken 
 to give and grant away our money, without our knowledge or consent; 
 and in order to compel us to a servile submission to the above measures, 
 have proceeded to block up the harbour of Boston; also, have, or are 
 about to vacate the Charter, and repeal certain laws of this Province, 
 heretofore enacted by the General Court, and confirmed to us by the 
 King and his predecessors. Therefore, as a means to obtain a speedy 
 redress of the above grievances, We do solemnly and in good faith cove- 
 nant and engage with each other: 
 
 1st. That we will not import, purchase, or consume, or suffer any 
 person for, by, or under us, to import, purchase, or consume, in any 
 manner whatever, any goods, wares, or manufactures, which shall arrive 
 in America from Great Britain, from and after the first day of October 
 next, or such other time as shall be agreed upon by the American Con- 
 gress; nor any goods which shall be agreed upon by the American Con- 
 gress; nor any goods which shall be ordered from thence from and after 
 this day, until our Charter and constitutional rights shall be restored; 
 . . . — "At a Congress of the Deputies of the several towns within 
 
 * The town of Pittsfield has erected a neat obelisk of marble to the memory of Mrs. 
 Demlng, in the little burial-ground on Honasada [Elm] Street, near the spot where she fixed 
 her home in 1752. The following inscriptions embody the traditions handed down regarding 
 her :— 
 
 South Side —This monument is erected by the town of Pittsfield to commemorate the 
 heroism and virtues of its first female settler, and the mother of the first white child born 
 within its limits. 
 
 iVoWA— Surrounded by tribes of hostile Indians, she defended, in more than one instance, 
 unaided, the lives and property of her family, and was distinguished for the courage and 
 fortitude with which she bore ihe dangers and privations of a pioneer life. 
 
 East —K mother of the Revolution and a mother in Israel. 
 
 irM<.— Sarah Deming. born in Wethersfield. Conn., Feb., 1726. Died in Pittsfield, Mass., 
 March, 1818, aged 92 years.— From ''"History of Pittsfield,'''' by J. E. A. Smith 
 
102 
 
 Berkshire County, convened at Stockbridge, on the sixth day of July, 
 1774." 
 
 To the Honorable His Majesty's Justices of the Inferior Court of 
 Common Pleas for the County of Berkshire: The Petition of the inhab- 
 itants of the Toivn of Pittsfield, assembled in town meeting, on Monday, 
 the loth day of August, 1774, 
 
 Humbly sheweth: That whereas two late acts of the British Parlia- 
 ment, for superceding the charter of this Province, and vacating some 
 of the principal and invaluable privileges and franchises therein con- 
 tained, have passed the Royal assent, and have been published in the 
 Boston papers, that our obedience might be yielded to them; 
 
 We view it of the greatest importance to the well being of this 
 Province, that the people of it utterly refuse the least submission to the 
 said acts, and on no consideration to yield obedience to them . . . 
 but resist them to the last extremity. 
 
 In order in the safest manner to avoid this threatening calamity, it 
 is in our opinion highly necessary that no business be transacted in the 
 law; but that the courts of justice immediately cease, and the people of 
 this Province fall into a state of nature, until our grievances are fully 
 redressed, by a final repeal of these injurious, oppressive, and unconsti- 
 tutional acts. We have the pleasure to find tha<t this is the sentiment 
 of the greater part of the people of this province, and we are persuaded 
 that no man that duly understands the state of our public affairs, who 
 has business at the approaching term, but will advise and consent to the 
 same, and willingly undergo personal inconvenience for the public good. 
 We do therefore remonstrate against the holding any courts in this 
 County, until these acts shall be repealed. 
 
 During the Revolutionary War Berkshire County furnished 
 her share of soldiers. The battle nearest to Berkshire was that of 
 Bennington, fought August 16, 1777. In that battle there were 
 three Berkshire regiments. Pittsfield's famotis "Fighting Parson 
 Allen" was among the Berkshire men at Bennington. When the 
 news of a coming battle at Bennington reached Pittsfield, Parson 
 Allen assembled the men of his congregation in the meeting-house, 
 and, musket in hand, called upon them to go with him and fight for 
 their rights. His call was answered and many Pittsfield men went 
 with him to Bennington. Parson Allen is said to have fired the 
 first shot on the American side in this battle. After the battle of 
 Saratoga, a part of the army of Burgoyne (the defeated British 
 general) was marched thrti Pittsfield and several other towns of 
 the county on its way to Boston, This part of the army numbered 
 2,500 men. 
 
103 
 
 When the County was first settled, and for many years afterwards, 
 the only road from the east, over the Green mountain range, was from 
 blanford, in the County of Hampden, through the south-east part of 
 Otis, the north part of Sandisfield, and through Tyringham to Great Bar- 
 rington. This was called the great road from Boston to Albany. It was 
 much travelled in the French wars, and in the war of the Revolution. 
 The troops and stores of Major General Amherst went over it to the 
 capture of Ticonderoga. On it the captured army of Burgoyne passed 
 from Saratoga to Boston. He was lodged one night in Tyringham. — From 
 "A History of the County of Berkshire," written by Gentlemen in the 
 County, 1S29. 
 
 . . . When the Declaration of Independence was made public, it 
 was read in the churches. At the reading in Sheffield, a poor negro girl, 
 a slave, was present. She heard it, and said, "It stands to reason that 
 I am free." She sought Mr. Sedgwick, afterwards Judge Sedgwick, then 
 a young lawyer; and he brought a suit to establish her freedom. The 
 court adjudged her to be free. Here was an instance, and the first, where 
 that famous declaration was held to mean what it said. The other in- 
 cident relates to the fighting parson of Pittsfield. who, when Burgoyne 
 was coming down upon New York and Vermont, marched with the militia 
 of his congregation, and arriving at Bennington just in time to join 
 in the battle, leaped upon a rock, saying to the man behind him, "You 
 load, and I'll fire!" Seeing a flash from a bush in the enemy's lines fol- 
 lowed by the fall of one of our men, he aimed at the bush, and, according 
 to his own expression, "put out the flash."- — From Remarks by Hon. David 
 Dudley Field, at Edwards Family Meeting, Stockbridge, September, 1870. 
 
 All day long the rain fell in torrents, and while the Germans began 
 to throw up intrenchments, Stark laid his plans for storming their posi- 
 tion on the morrow. During the night a company of Berkshire militia 
 arrived, and with them the excellent Mr. Allen, the warlike parson of 
 Pittsfield, who went up to Stark and said, "Colonel, our Berkshire people 
 have been often called out to no purpo.se, and if you don't let them fight 
 now they will never turn out again." "Well," said Stark, "Would you 
 have us turn out now, while it is pitch dark and raining buckets?" "No, 
 not just this minute," replied the minister. "Then," said the doughty 
 Stark, "as soon as the Lord shall once more send us sunshine, if I don't 
 give you fighting enough, I'll never ask you to come out again." — From 
 "The American Revolution," by John Fiske. 
 
 Shays's Rebellion. — After the Revolution the people were 
 taxed to pay the expenses of that war. Many of the people were in 
 debt to one another. There was very little money in the country. 
 The government could not pay the soldiers who had served in the 
 Revolution. At that time people could be imprisoned for debt. 
 Creditors were withotit mercv and many debtors were kept in prison 
 for years. The government of Massachusetts was trying to im- 
 
104 
 
 prove the condition of things by making proper laws, but the course 
 of law is slow, and the people thought they could not wait. 
 
 Preventing Sessions of the Courts. — Meetings were held in 
 many places in western Massachusetts. It was decided to stop the 
 imprisonment of the debtors by preventing the courts from doing 
 business. This was first done at Northampton in Hampshire 
 County in 1782, when a party of men surrounded the court-house 
 and prevented the court from holding its session. The leader was 
 arrested and taken to the Springfield jail, from which he was re- 
 leased by a mob. The leaders of this mob were put into jail and a 
 crowd of men gathered to release them, but the militia was called 
 out and the mob scattered without bloodshed. The conventions, 
 howe\'er, continued to be held and courts were several times pre- 
 vented from holding their sessions. At Great Harrington about 800 
 men collected, prevented the session of the court, broke open the 
 jail, and released the prisoners. 
 
 The Rebellion Organized. — About Christmas in 1786, this dis- 
 turbance took the form of an organized rebellion under Daniel 
 Shays, a former captain in the Revolution. There were about 400 
 Berkshire men in his army. General Benjamin Lincoln, a famous 
 Revolutionary general, was given the task of restoring order with 
 a body of about 4000 militia. 
 
 Ended in Berkshire County. — January 25, Shays tried to take 
 possession of the Arsenal at Springfield, but his men ran away 
 when the militia fired upon them. They retreated to Petersham in 
 Worcester County, where they met a body of militia. The insur- 
 gents were defeated, 150 of them being taken prisoners. After this 
 they retreated to Berkshire. General Lincoln sent two divisions of 
 his army to Pittsfield. February 27, eighty or ninety men from 
 Shays's army entered Stockbridge, robbed the people, and made 
 prisoners of some of the most respectable citizens. From there 
 they went to Great Barrington, then to Sheffield. There they were 
 met and badly defeated by a body of militia. This was the last 
 and most severe encounter of the rebellion. 
 
 War of 18 12. — When the war between England and the 
 United States broke out in 1812, Pittsfield was the center of the 
 gathering of the troops in Berkshire. It was also used as a place 
 of confinement for British prisoners taken in that war. The can- 
 tonment, as the place where the recruits assembled was called, 
 belonged to the United States government. It covered the land 
 since occupied by Maplewood Young Ladies' Institute, St. Joseph's 
 
105 
 
 church and pastor's residence, and also about seven acres east of 
 First Street. 
 
 Berkshire Jubilee.— August '22 and 23, 1844, occurred at Pitts- 
 field the "Berkshire Jubilee," a great meeting of the sons and 
 daughters of Berkshire County, who came from various parts of the 
 country to visit their old home, to meet one another, and to renew 
 old associations. The meeting was remarkably successful, and a 
 book was published giving an account of the meeting and contain- 
 ing the sermon, addresses, poems, and speeches delivered on the 
 occasion. . J 
 
 We have often thought, sir,— thought with pride, of our gorgeous hills 
 and valleys, which have been so beautifully celebrated at this time; we 
 have often taken pride in this our home, and in all that is included in 
 the term "Berkshire," and thought that we had scenery unsurpassed in 
 nature. We thought that this occasion would bring bright and loved be- 
 ings around us— brighter and more loved than whom, could not be found 
 on tae face of the earth. But, I doubt not, this pride in the present 
 occupants of Berkshire, has been justly rebuked and deeply humbled. 
 We had no conception of the beauty, the intellect, the character, and the 
 real nobility of nature, which this meeting would call home; and here- 
 after we shall look back upon this gathering as one of the brightest and 
 most beautiful occasions in our earthly pilgrimage. We have been think- 
 ing how we could erect some monument of this Jubilee. In our wisdom, 
 we have spoken of several ; but after all, God has been before us, and His 
 mighty hand hath reared the Monument. That Hill from which we came 
 to this pavilion, will hereafter bear the name of "JUBILEE HILL!" and 
 when our heads are laid in the grave, and we have passed away and are 
 forgotten, we hope our children, and our children's children, will walk 
 over that beautiful spot and say, "Here our fathers and mothers celebrated 
 the Berkshire Jubilee!" This monument shall stand as long as the foot- 
 stool of God shall remain.— From. Response of Dr. John Todd, Chairman 
 of the Berkshire Comity Committee, at the Berkshire Jubilee, 18U. 
 
 The Civil War.— \\'hen the Civil War between the North and 
 the South came in 1861. many Berkshire men answered the call for 
 soldiers. One Massachusetts regiment, the 49th, consisted entirely 
 of them. Its well beloved Colonel, afterwards General William F. 
 Bartlett, was severely wounded in the war. After its close he mar- 
 ried, lived, died and was buried in Pittsfield. 
 
106 
 
 WILLIAM FRANCIS BARTLETT. 
 
 # 
 
 Oh, well may Essex sit forlorn 
 Beside her sea-blown shore; 
 
 Her well beloved, her noblest born, 
 Is hers in life no more! 
 
 No lapse of years can render less 
 
 Her memory's sacred claim; 
 No fountain of forgetfulness 
 
 Can wet the lips of Fame. 
 
 A grief alike to wound and heal, 
 A thought to soothe and pain, 
 
 The sad, sweet pride that mothers feel 
 To her must still remain. 
 
 Good men and true she has not lacked, 
 And brave men yet shall be; 
 
 The perfect flower, the crowning fact, 
 Of all her years was he! 
 
 As Galahad pure, as Merlin sage. 
 What worthier knight was found 
 
 To grace in Arthur's golden age 
 The fabled Table Round? 
 
107 
 
 A voice, the battle's trumpet-note, 
 
 To welcome and restore; 
 A hand, that all unwilling smote. 
 
 To heal and build once more! 
 
 A soul of fire, a tender heart 
 
 Too warm for hate, he knew 
 The generous victor's graceful part 
 
 To sheathe the sword he drew. 
 
 "When Earth, as if on evil dreams. 
 
 Looks back upon her wars, 
 And the white light of Christ outstreams 
 
 From the red disk of Mars, 
 
 His fame who led the stormy van 
 
 Of battle well may cease. 
 But never that which crowns the man 
 
 Whose victory was Peace. 
 
 Mourn, Essex, on thy sea-blown shore 
 
 Thy beautiful and brave, 
 Whose failing hand the olive bore. 
 
 Whose dying lips forgave! 
 
 Let age lament the youthful chief. 
 
 And tender eyes be dim; 
 The tears are more of joy than grief 
 
 That fall for one like him! 
 
 — By John Greenleaf Whittier. 
 
 Among- the three-years Massachusetts regiments in which 
 Berkshire Comity was largely represented were the loth, 21st, 31st, 
 34th, and 37th. Henry S. Briggs, son of Governor Briggs, was 
 Colonel of the loth Massachusetts regiment and was afterwards 
 made a Brigadier General. 
 
 Soldiers' Monument. — A monument to the Pittsfield soldiers 
 who died "that the nation might live" was erected in the Park in 
 1872. The bronze statue of a color-sergeant standing upon the 
 square granite pillar was modeled by Mr. Launt Thompson, a noted 
 
108 
 
 sculptor. The inscriptions have been much admired and are as 
 follows : 
 
 On the west face: 
 
 FOR THE DEAD 
 A TRIBUTE 
 
 FOR THE LIVING 
 A MEMORY 
 
 FOR POSTERITY 
 
 AN EMBLEM 
 
 OF LOYALTY TO THE FLAG 
 
 OF THEIR COUNTRY 
 
 On the east face : 
 
 WITH GRATEFUL RECOGNITION 
 OF THE SERVICES OF ALL HER 
 
 SONS 
 
 WHO UPHELD THE HONOR AND 
 
 INTEGRITY OF OUR BELOVED 
 
 COUNTRY 
 
 IN HER HOUR OF PERIL 
 
 THE TOWN OF 
 
 PITTSFIELD 
 
 ERECTS THIS MONUMENT IN 
 
 LOVING MEMORY OF THOSE 
 
 WHO DIED THAT THE 
 
 NATION 
 
 MIGHT LIVE. 
 
 Let us be grateful for Greece two thousand years ago, and thank 
 God that we live in America to-day! The war scattered the glamour of 
 the past and showed us that we, too, live among great virtues, great 
 characters and great men. Through these streets the culture of Greece, 
 the heroism of Rome, the patriotism of our own revolution, have marched 
 before your eyes. These elms, like the trees of Ardennes,* have shed 
 their tears in dew drops over the unreturning brave. The ground upon 
 which we stand is consecrated by the tread of feet gladly going to the 
 noblest sacrifice. And from these throbbing drums and wailing horns, 
 still peals the music to which they marched away. They were your sons, 
 titusfleld and green Berkshire! They were your comrades, Massachu- 
 
 * A famous forest in Southern Belgium and Northeastern France. 
 
109 
 
 setts soldiers! They were the darlings of your homes, tender hearts that 
 hear me! And here in this fair figure of heroic youth, they stand as 
 you will always recall them — the bloom of immortal youth upon their 
 cheeks; the divine hope of youth in their hearts; the perpetual inspira- 
 tion of youth to every beholder. For this is the American soldier of the 
 Union; the messenger of liberty to the captive and of peace to the nation. 
 This is the perpetual but silent preacher of the gospel of liberty and 
 justice as the only sure foundation of states. "Beautiful on the moun- 
 tains are the feet of him that bringeth glad tidings, that publisheth peace, 
 that saith unto Zion, thy God reigneth!" — <From an oration by George 
 William Curtis at the Dedication of the Soldiers' Monument, Pittsfield, 
 September 24, 187^. 
 
 The Berkshire Athenaeum was erected abotjt 1875, largely 
 thru the efforts of Mr. Thomas Allen and other public-spirited men 
 who gave time and money that Pittsfield might have a suitable 
 building for a free library. The gate at the entrance to the Pitts- 
 field Cemetery was also the gift of Mr. Allen. 
 
 
 CEMETERY GATEWAY. 
 
 Newspapers.— TAi' Pittsfield Sun celebrated its looth anni- 
 versary in 1900. The Eagle is also a very old newspaper. 
 
 Medical College. — One of the noted institutions of Berkshire 
 was the Berkshire Medical College in Pittsfield, founded in 1822 
 and continued to 1867. 
 
 Railroads. — Pittsfield and North Adams owe much of their 
 growth and prosperity to the railroads that connect them with larger 
 cities. Work on the road that connects Pittsfield with Boston and 
 Albany was begun in 1837. The road was opened for use from the 
 east in May, 1841, and was completed in 1842. It was then called 
 
no 
 
 the Western Railroad. The last rail of the North Adams branch 
 was laid at eleven o'clock, October 6, 1846. At half-past eleven 
 the locomotive Greylock with a car attached entered North Adams 
 The Housatonic Railroad, now the Berkshire Division of the New 
 York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, was opened Jan. i, 1850. 
 
 Left Northampton the next morning, between one and two o'clock. 
 . . Sometimes we passed a house, or rumbled through a village, stoi> 
 ping perhaps to arouse some drowsy, postmaster, who appeared at the 
 door. . . yawning, received the mail, returned it again, and was 
 yawning when last seen. A few words exchanged among the passengers, 
 as they roused themselves from their half-slumbers, or dreamy, slumber- 
 like abstraction. Meantime dawn broke, our faces became partially vis- 
 ible, the morning air grew colder, and finally cloudy day came on. . . . 
 The road was not the safest in the world; for often the carriage ap- 
 proached within two or three feet of a precipice; but the driver, a merry 
 fellow, lolled on his box, with his feet protruding horizontally, and rattled 
 on at the rate of ten miles an hour. Breakfast between four and five, — 
 newly caught trout, salmon, ham, boiled eggs, and other niceties, — truly 
 excellent. A bunch of pickerel, intended for a tavern-keeper farther on, 
 was carried by the stage-driver. . . . 
 
 The highest point of our journey was at Windsor, where we could 
 see leagues around over the mountain, a terribly bare, bleak spot, fit for 
 nothing but sheep, and without shelter of woods. We rattlec' downward 
 into a warmer region, beholding as we went the sun shining on portions 
 of the landscape, miles ahead of us, while we were yet in chilliness and 
 gloom. It is probable that during a part of the stage the mists around 
 us looked like sky clouds to those in the lower regions. Think of driv- 
 ing a stage-coach through the clouds! Seasonably in the forenoon we 
 arrived at Pittsfield. 
 
 Pittsfleld is a large village, quite shut in by mountain walls, generally 
 extending like a rampart on all sides of it, but with . . . great hills 
 rising here and there in the outline. The area of the town is level; its 
 houses are handsome, mostly wooden and white; but some are of brick 
 painted deep red, the bricks being not of a healthy, natural color. There 
 are handsome churches, Gothic and others, and a court-house and an 
 academy; the court-house having a marble front. There is a small mall 
 in the center of the town, and in the center of the mall rises an elm of 
 the loftiest and straightest stem that ever I beheld, without a branch or 
 leaf upon it till it has soared seventy or perhaps a hundred feet into the 
 air. The top branches unfortunately have been shattered somehow or 
 other, so that it does not cast a broad shade; probably they were broken 
 by their own ponderous foliage. The central square of Pittsfield presents 
 all the bustle of a thriving village, — the farmers of the vicinity in light 
 wagons, sulkies, or on horseback; stages at the door of the Berkshire 
 
Ill 
 
 Hotel, under the stoop of which sit or lounge the guests, stage-people, 
 and idlers, observing or assisting in the arrivals and departures. Huge 
 trunks and bandboxes unladed and laded. The courtesy shown to ladles 
 
 JOHN CHANDLER WILLIAMS S HOUSE.* 
 (Built about 1780.) 
 
 in aiding them to alight, in a shower, under umbrellas. The dull looks 
 of passengers, who have driven all night, scarcely brightened by the ex- 
 citement of arriving at a new place. The stage agent demanding the 
 names of those who are going on,— some to Lebanon Springs, some to 
 Albany. ... At dinner soup preliminary, in city style. Guests: the 
 court people; Briggs member of Congress, attending a trial here; horse 
 dealers, country squires, storerkeepers in the village, etc. My room, a 
 narrow crib overlooking a back court-yard, where a young man and a 
 lad were drawing water for the maid-servants. 
 
 Wednesday, July 26, JS38. — Left Pittsfield at about eight o'clock in 
 the Bennington stage, intending to go to Williamstown. Inside passen- 
 gers, — a new-married couple taking a jaunt. — From Nathaniel Haw- 
 thorne's "Avierican Note-Books." 
 
 * Twenty-three voters— principally those personally interested-— . . . requested a 
 town-meeting [1790], and were able to carry a vote to place the meeting-house seven feet 
 further south than had been previously determined. 
 
 . But for this it was necessary to fell the tall and graceful elm— fairer than any work of 
 man'» hand— which had been spared by the first settlers for its conspicuous beauty. . . . 
 
 It happened, by a fortunate chance, that, at the clo.se of the Revolution, the handsome 
 mansion . . . had been purchased by John Chandler Williams, a gentleman of culture 
 and refined tastes, who was also blessed by an equally gifted wife. 
 
 . . . So intense was the excitement of Mrs. Williams in view of the intended sacrilege, 
 that she appeared upon the scene, and, finding the most passionate entreaties vain, threw 
 herself between the tree and the axe, and at last procured a postponement of the work of 
 destruction until the matter could again be considered by the town.— i''/o»i "History of Pitts- 
 field," by J. E. A. Smith. 
 
SEP U 19M 
 
 112 
 
 The. Hoosac Tunnel was begun in 1855. Many times the work 
 was stopped. The first car passed thru February 9, 1875. 
 
 North Adams and Adams. — The interests of the two vil- 
 lages of North and South Adams were so separate that in 1878 the 
 town was divided into the two towns of North Adams and Adams, 
 thus making 32 towns in Berkshire County. A State Normal 
 School was opened in North Adams in 1897. 
 
 Williams College in Williamstown owes its origin and its 
 name to Colonel Ephraim Williams. He left a part of his estate 
 to found a free school, which was opened in October, 1791. It was 
 changed from a free school to a college in 1793. 
 
 HOPKINS MEMORIAL. 
 (One of the buildings of Williams College.) 
 
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