Lenox and the Berkshire highlands

Preface

THE author's desire in the publication of these essays and addresses, some of which have been read before various hterary and historical societies, is to orient the stranger who is within the gates of the Berkshire country. Lenox has become so notably on the beaten path of travel as to demand, in convenient form, some handbook of information which shall play the part of guide. The aim of this book is not to write history but to tell enough of the story of the past to aid in makino- the reo;ion intellio-ible.

Great pains has been taken to insure historical accuracy, but inasmuch as authorities are not always in perfect agreement it is too much to be hoped that inerrancy has been secured in every instance. In order to compass the aim of absolute veracity, the author, after consulting the sources, whether in books, town and church records, or in the collections of historical societies, submitted the manuscript of this book to the perusal of a vi Preface

few townsmen. Kindly acknowledgments are herewith returned to my friends and college mates, Robert C. Rockwell, Esq., and Richard Goodman, Esq., both of Lenox, for valuable suggestions. I am also indebted to Miss Anna L. White, of the Lenox Library, for assistance in proof-reading.

R. DeW. Mallary.

" Springcroft,"

Lenox, Mass.,

January i6, 1902.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — Old-time Lenox ..... i

II. — Lenox and its Environment, in Literature. ...... 47

II Lenox And Its Environment, In Literature

IT is not difficult to understand how some ^ regions, beautiful by reason of their scenic loveliness, should be stamped with a sort of predestination to a high place in literature. A natural beauty in the landscape does something more than attract the tourist ; it appeals to those instincts which fashion the poet or the artist. It is also true that the literary traditions and artistic surroundings of any locality prepare a soil out of which spring the very conditions favorable to the maintenance of Its prestige. By the river Arno, in the "lake region " of Cumberland and Westmoreland, or on the placid river which flows throu^rh the Concord meadows what congestion of literary associations ! Like the instinct of the bee which, separated by great distances from the hive, possesses the infallible sense of direction for Its return, so too the lovely " nooks and corners " on the earth's surface are irresistibly and unerringly attracting choice spirits, which some way are sure to find them out and preempt them in the interests of their craft or clan. Berkshire is no exception to this, and at one time Lenox was fairly entitled to the name it received, "a jungle of literary lions." It shall be our task in this chapter to present a few of the many pages where Lenox and the Berkshires have been the inspiring themes of graceful and distinguished writers ; to trace the literary thread in the story of the village and the region.

Just a little foreword, then, supplementing rather than repeating what was said in the previous chapter. It will be remembered that Berkshire lay practically undiscovered until 1724, when the first settlers obtained from the Mohican Indians, for the consideration^ of " ^460, three barrels of cider, and thirty quarts of rum," that portion of land comprised in the present townships of Sheffield, Great Barrington, Mount Washington, Egremont, Alford? and some part of Stockbridge, West Stockbridge, and Lee. This is that section of the county which extends on the west side of the Housatonic River from the Taghconic

Dome to Monument Mountain. In 1736, the General Court ordered to be laid out on the east side of same river four towns which became known asTyringham, New Marlborough, Sandisfield, and Becket, but which were called at first simply and respectively townships i, 2, 3, and 4 ; and in the same year the colonial legislature granted the Indians a township, or reservation, immediately north of, and contiguous to, the first-named section. This reservation was an exact square six miles, on each side, and embraced the land occupied by the present townships of Stockbridge and West Stockbridge. It was called by the Indians Wnogh-que-too-koke, and here they were collected for missionary instruction under Sergeant. It would take us too far afield to recite here the order and extent of grants by the General Court to individuals in this part of Western Massachusetts, then, and until 1761, included in Hampshire County. Suffice it to say that it was not until i 750 that the first settler drove a stake in Lenox, although there had previously been two large land grants in the region, one in 1738 to the heirs of Judge Edmund Quincy in the northeast, and another, the same year, to some ministers in the south, of what is now Lenox township. The " Quincy grant " contained a thousand acres, and its southern boundary was not far from the northern Hne of the present estate of Mrs. R. T. Auchmuty. The grant was in recognition of the eminent services of Judge Quincy to the State, he having been selected by the General Court to lay the matter of the disputed boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire before the home government, and dying soon after his arrival in London with smallpox contracted by inoculation. The " Ministers' grant," so-called, was a tract of four thousand acres, and comprised that tongue of land, in the southern part of the town, whose tip wedges in between Stockbridge and Lee, and, including what is now known as Laurel Lake, this grant extended northward considerably beyond the high ground on which Lenox village is situated.

It is in connection with this " Ministers' grant " that, I venture to say, the first association of Lenox with literature is traced, though more accurately it might be said with a name great in the sacred literature of the world — Jonathan Edwards. This extensive grant was divided among the seven grantees in parcels or strips from east to west, of 480 acres each, with one or two exceptions, and one fell to Jonathan Edwards, who at that time was minister to the church at Northampton. It is on that Edwards section that the village of Lenox, along one of its principal streets, Walker Street, stands. It is more customary to associate Edwards with Stockbridge, where until within a year the house in which he wrote The Freedom of tJie Will was still standincr, but the distinouished theoloofian had a property interest in what was to be the future town of Lenox. It must have been that many times during the years of his Stockbridge pastorate, 1751-58, he would ride up the hills towards his real-estate holdings while he thought out some deep prob. lem in metaphysics, or meditated some adroit manoeuvre to circumvent those who constantly harassed the missionary interests and fleeced the Indians. It is at least pleasant to connect Lenox with the name of Edwards, to whose short ministry in Stockbridge, if not to the lonaer one " in the solitudes of the Northampton woods," Whittier refers in his poem, The Preacher :

" In the church of the wilderness Edwards wrought. Shaping his creed at the forge of thought ; And with Thor's own hammer welded and bent The iron links of his argument,

Which strove to grasp in its mighty span The purpose of God and the fate of man ! "

Lenox during the first decade of its history, from 1750 until 1760, was such an unfavorable place for residence, owing to the fear of incursions of maraudinof bands of Indians, that its growth was much impeded, and, in common with all other parts of the county, it was not till the French power was crippled at Quebec in 1759, ^'^^^ thus the Indian incursions confined to the remoter territory at the north beyond the St. Lawrence, that the settlement of Berkshire could proceed. There was growth in the southern part of the county, but the middle and northern portions were unsafe prior to the year 1760. Hardly had peace been declared between Great Britain and France when settlers poured into Berkshire. So far as Lenox is concerned events proceed rapidly. The county of Berkshire was set off by the General Court in May, 1761, its northern boundary New Hampshire and its western boundary the somewhat indeterminate and disputed line between Massachusetts and New York, a line which was not accurately and satisfactorily run until the summer of 1787. On June 2, 1762, the General Court ordered ten townships to be sold in the western part of the State, and " Lot No. 8," comprising the present towns of Lenox and Richmond, was knocked down to the highest bidder, Josiah Dean, for ^2550, but owing to some claims of the Indians, and a prior ckiim of one Samuel Brown, and others who had bought the land covered in the sale to Dean by purchase from the Indians for ^^1700, the grant was finally confirmed by the State to Brown, he paying Dean ^650. This purchase did not of course, invalidate previous grants in the same district, and the whole, which had been named for the chiefs of whom the land had been bought, was incorporated under the name Richmond in 1765, until 1767, when that portion of the township which had gone by the name of Yokuntown was called Lenox, by act of incorporation.

It is a fitting place, then, to stop, and take a little measure of Lennox, Duke of Richmond, inasmuch as Governor Bernard (Francis Bernard, Governor of Massachusetts, 1760-69) bestowed the titular and family names of this eminent nobleman and statesman upon what were Mount Ephraim and Yokuntown. Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond, and Baron Methuen in the peerage of Scotland, was born in London, February 22, 1734-35. Choosing the army for his profession he became attached to the court, and by rapid promotions was successively Lord of the Bedchamber (1760), Major- General (1761), Lord Lieutenant of Sussex (1763), and Secretary of State (1766). When the town of Lenox was named for him he was Minister Plenipotentiary of the Most Christian King. The Duke of Richmond played a very important part in the counsels of state incident to the troublous questions connected with the breaking out of the American Revolution and was a member of various ministries during and after the unsuccessful attempt of Great Britain to subdue her colonies. He was an earnest Whig, decidedly radical in his views and a vigorous exponent of democracy. On the pages of, Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Centnry he is conspicuous among the dramatis personce of the time, and throughout the polished letters of that courtgossip, Horace Walpole, there are many very interesting references to the high social prominence of his Grace, the Duke of Richmond. He carried the sceptre with the dove at the coronation of George HL He opposed the war with America and was for surrendering the English dominion over the colonies, declaring this view as early as 1776, as he wished to make America England's ally in case of future wars with France, and as he feared a victory of England over America would give the Tory element at home a long lease of power, and would be fatal to English liberty. America had to be free, in other words, that England mi^^ht be free.

It is not difficult to imagine that the Duke's radical views made him a little out of joint with the times, and as he took a rather gloomy view of Enorland's cause and condition at the outbreak of the American Revolution, he abstained several years from the court of George III., being recalled to the service of the state and serving in the ministries of Rockingham and Pitt when the war was over. He was, however, always an interested participant in all national affairs ; and favored universal suffrage, though Burke opposed it. He was a man, says Lecky, " of great influence and ability." He really was one of the founders of the Liberal party which began to be in those corrupt days preceding the Stamp Act, and which was fostered by some young men of high nobility, "high in rank," says Trevelyan, " with rare exceptions, and most of them too rich, and all too manly, to be purchased," whose creed was summed up by one of their own number, Edmund Burke, as " the principles of morality enlarged." There were many stormy scenes in Parliament where the Duke of Richmond was a centre of interest and dramatic action; once when he opposed a motion to clear the galleries, and thereby precipitated an uproar in the House of Lords, in the midst of which the Duke of Richmond himself walked out followed by a very large train of peers, protesting thus energetically against any Star -Chamber proceedings; and again when he moved in the Lords on the 7th of April, 1778, that the war with America be stopped, upon the best terms obtainable for Encrland, to which resolution Chatham replied in an impassioned speech which caused him to sink in an apoplectic fit from which he did not recover.

The Duke of Richmond became very unpopular on account of his radical political morality and intensely democratic spirit. The family name Lennox was spelled with two lis, though on the tomb of the Duke of Richmond it appears with only one; and the ancestor of the Duke for whom Lenox is named affixed his signature to the original grant by Charles L to the Plymouth Colony as " Lenox." The omission of one n in the name of the town is ascribed to accident occasioned by the difference in writing double letters, which were written formerly as one letter through which passed a dash, indicating that the letter was to be repeated. It is thought the dash came to be omitted by inadvertence, and so the present spelling with one /^ adopted. The literary traditions of Lenox and of the region could not be written without some reference to the " Stockbridge Indians," so-called, an extended reference to whom will be deferred until later. Suffice it to say that traces of aboriginal occupancy still survive, though somewhat faintly m connection with the names of mountain, lake, stream, and street, and though appearing as a palimpsest under other and less romantic names, yet the Indian nomenclature of nature's points of interest is not entirely obliterated. Afar off to the north rises Greylock thirty-five hundred feet, called Saddleback by the early settlers, but I cannot find that it ever had an Indian name. The Berkshire Mountains were the hunting-grounds for the " River Indians," living along the Mahecannituck (Hudson), and the little lake lying just north of Pittsfield has received the name Pontoosuck (" Field of the Winter Deer"), which was the original name of what is now the city of Pittsfield, although the lake itself was called by the Indians Skoon - keek - moon - keek. But if Greylock seems to have had no distinctive Indian name, the beauty which its name suggests has been repeatedly celebrated by the masters of poetry and prose. From Lenox it stands out an isolated saddle high up on the northern sky and fitted only for a Titan's frame. It is the highest mountain in the State, and its appearance in the form of a saddle is really formed by two summits, one rising a little behind and at the side of the other. Turning the eyes in the opposite direction from Greylock as one stands on the high elevation in Lenox just north of the village known as " Church Hill," and looking off to the south, it is not difficult to reclothe with their olden Mohican appellations the prominent features in the charming landscape stretching away from the beholder. Far away, twenty miles as the crow ffies, rises the solitary Tagh-kan-nuc (" Forest"), or as it is called, and as it indeed appears in the central part of Berkshire, the " Dome of the Taghconics," and between it and the height from which we are looking rose to the redskin the tops of Maus-wa-see-khi (" Fisher's Nest "), now called Monument Mountain, and Deowkook, or " Hill of the Wolves," now

Rattlesnake, though another name by which the latter is said to have been known to the Indians is Mau-sku-fee-haunk. It is an enchanting prospect, one vast intervale walled in by the Hoosacs on the east and the Taghconics on the west, Deowkook, Maus-wa-see-khi, and Tagh-kan-nuc rising successively higher and higher into the far distance, while near us, nestlingr under the heights of Deowkook on the right is the placid and beautiful Mah-keenac, and on the hither side Per-quan-a-pa-qua (" Lake of the Still Water "), on whose surfaces are mirrored the surrounding hills.

If now we see the view before us at a higher altitude, as some eagle that only, touches foot on the peaks to rest must see it in its flight through the upper airs, the mountains would be stunted, but running through the heart of the vale would be seen the extremely tortuous twistings and windings of the Hoo-es-ten-nuc (Housatonic), " Over the Mountain," as it makes its way from its sources by its west branch in Skoon-keek-moon-keek and Onota, near Pontoosuck (Pittsfield), onwards to the sea. At Wnogh-que-too-koke (Stockbridge), which lies there just beyond Mahkeenac, and on this side of Maus-wa-see-khi, we should see the Hoo-es-ten-nuc receiving the waters of the Konkapot brook, so named after the chief who hved beside it, then we should see the main stream of the valley cutting a way for itself through the gorge just below, called by the Indians " Pack-wa-ke " (a term signifying bend or elbow by which the aborigines designated the sharp turn in the Housatonic at Glendale), and becoming a little farther down " Sagistonac " (meaning " Water Splashing over the Rocks,") or falls, near which place the Waumpa-nick-se-poot or Green River, having itself just been swollen by the Seekonk (" Wild Goose "), joins the larger and main river of the valley. This place where the H oo-es-ten-nuc and Waumpa-nick-se-poot unite was a " Skatekook," or " a place where a small stream enters into a large one, and corn-lands adjoin," and this name Skatekook was applied to the primitive and aboriginal settlement of what subsequently became Sheffield, the earliest town to be settled and incorporated in Berkshire. Almost all of this Indian nomenclature has disappeared from practical use, but a great many legends of the aborigines survive in various sections of Berkshire, and are told in Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. Far off " Taghconic," called simply " The Dome," was christened " Mount Everett" by Dr. Hitchcock, State

Lenox in Literature 6i

geologist, in 1839, in honor of Edward Everett, the Governor of the commonweahh, and though bitterly protested against the name has found its way into current use, particularly in the southern portion of the county, where its appearance as a dome is less marked. One of the most earnest opponents of the change of name was Miss Catherine Sedgwick, but she is the reputed originator of the name " Stockbridge Bowl," which has entirely supplanted " Lake Mahkeenac " for which it was substituted.

It would take us too far afield to point out all the literary associations connected with the points of interest, as our eye sweeps the horizon and the magnificent prospect before us. Afar off in the north on the farther slopes of Greylock, yet within the limits of the Berkshire country, Williams College has quietly pursued its academic ideals for a hundred years, and there the deep impress of Mark Hopkins's broad and classic spirit is still felt ; nearer, and skirting the east of Pittsfield, is the region which is still redolent with the memory of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who spent seven summers, 1849-56, on a part of the old farm belonging originally to his great-grandfather, Jacob Wendell (three of Dr. Holmes's children havincr been born there duringr this Pittsfield sojourn), and we learn from the poet that " all of the present town of Pittsfield, except one thousand acres, was the property of my great-grandfather, who owned a section six miles square bought of the Province." There to the south are the steepling crags of Monument, which Bryant has immortalized, and near it the Green River, by whose banks he roamed when town clerk in the little villag-e of Great Harrington, on the other side of Mauswaseekhi. There are other literary names written across the picture, great names and small, and Lenox itself is resplendent in the galaxy of letters with many stars of the first magnitude. If you care to know, there on those hillside meadows yonder looking down on Skoon-keek-moon-keek, now called Pontoosuck Lake, " Josh Billings " was born, and you may see any day his huge granite sarcophagus, bearing his grotesque nam de phniie in large letters, in the village cemetery near by. Nearer, and hard by the Pittsfield village of fifty years ago, dwelt Herman Melville, who appears often in the Hawthorne correspondence, and who was the author of Typee, Omoo, Mardz, Rcdburn, and other sea-tales, popular in their day, winning for their author two columns in Allibone, and still very much appreciated as first-rank stories of their kind. In the same place (Pittsfield) dwells to-day a much-talked of writer, William Stearns Davis, whose promising career opens brilliantly. Look off to the south and on the summit of the far-away " Dome " is " Sky Farm " where the Goodale sisters (Dora and Elaine) wrote of "Apple Blossoms," and girded themselves with the vigor of their rugged clime for the more serious duties of life ; while off there to the west nestles a little lake, Queechy, just outside the county limits, where Susan Warner, the author of The Wide, Wide World and Queechy, lived and wrought in such a way as to make a very large public wait eagerly for her message.

Look up and down the county and mark the oft-frequency of those places where once flourished famous schools, — the Berkshire Medical College at Pittsfield, and the Maplewood Young Ladies' Institute in the same place, the Greylock Institute at South Williamstown, the Lenox Academy and Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's school for gfirls in Lenox, the Reid and Hoffman school in Stockbridge, and the South Berkshire Institute at New Marlborough, all of which institutions have quietly passed out of existence with no obsequies to commemorate their once efficient and famous services.

I cannot give the names of all those ministers of Berkshire who have become well known in the field of sacred literature from Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards, of whom something will be said hereafter, to Washington Gladden and Theodore T. Munger, who preached in the thriving city under the shadow of Greylock, and on to Charles H. Parkhurst, who scintillated both light and heat on this very mount before he was called to New York, I cannot dwell upon the representatives of art, from George Church to Barnard and French, the last named just now eno-a^ed in buildinor a studio and mansion there by Pack-wa-ke, to all of whom Berkshire has furnished inspiration, I cannot tell the long but interesting story of distinguished visitors within the county come to add their literary prestige to this and that section in the enchanted realm of Berkshire, from abroad Mrs, Jameson, Miss Martineau, Dean Stanley, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, and from our own catalogue of worthies more names than there is space to write. It is all one charming story of literary interest, aside from scenic charm or the thrillino- march of historic events, and many are the books the scenes of whose plots are laid in Berkshire, or in which scattered notices of the region appear. It is to be our task in this chapter to reproduce some of those passages.

And first let us get the view from distant "Taghconic Dome" as President Timothy Dwight of Yale College saw it one hundred and twenty years ago. Dr. Dwight was a great traveller and a voluminous writer, returning like Herodotus to recount tale after tale of his journeyings.

" In the year 1781," he says, " I ascended the loftiest summit of this mountain [the Dome], and found a most extensive and splendid prospect spread around me. On the north rose Saddle mountain, at the head of the Hooestennuc Valley at the distance of forty miles. At the same distance the Catskill mountains formed on the west the boundary of the vast valley of the Hudson ; and in the southwest the most northern summit of the Highlands. The chain of the Green Mountains on the east stretched its long succession of summits from north to south a prodigious length, while over them at a distance rose the single, solitary point of Mount Tom, and farther still at the termination of fifty or sixty miles, ascended successively various eminences. Monadnock at the distance of seventy miles on the northeast is distinctly discernible in a clear day."

Dr. Dwight in 1798 revisited the region, and journeying northward through Great

Barrington he substantiates what we know from the Memoirs of Hopkins about the notorious irrehgion then prevaiHng in that village, — horse racing the chief business, houses decayed, unthrift on all sides, the church in ruins and a shelter for sheep, having had no pastor for over thirty years, during and after the troublous Revolutionary times. Yet here was where the great Hopkins labored, being dismissed, after a twenty-five years' pastorate, in 1769. Dr. Dwight continues his journey over Monument Mountain so called because here was buried one of the aborigines, a girl, who, disappointed in love, had killed herself by leaping off a precipice on the west side, and each Indian who passed her grave threw a stone upon the place of sepulture, by which custom, practised many years, the heap had come to assume the proportions of a monument to the dead. This distinguished traveller calls attention to the " Eastern front of ' Monument,' a magnificent and awful precipice, formed by ragged perpendicular cliffs of white quartz and rising immediately west of the road between five and six hundred feet " ; and he notices, also, en passant, the tremendous geologic convulsion known as " Ice Glen," described so weirdly and vividly by Miss Sedgwick in A

N'czu England Talc (^1822) and visited annually by scores of people.

Proceeding on his journey President D wight, after a short stay in Stockbridge (the Indians had been gone then twelve years), comes to Lenox, which he describes as given in the chapter on the earlier history of the town.

A monument was unveiled recently on the grounds of Yale College to Benjamin Silliman, physicist, the distinguished professor of chemistry in that institution from 1802 until 1853. Dr. Silliman, following the example of President Dwight, made a journey in 1819 through New England and reported what he had seen in a volume entitled, Sillinian s Tour to QiLebec. Dwight rode ; Silliman's was a carriage journey, and I find in the record of his travels quite an extended reference to Lenox. This has already been given on page 26, and is only referred to again to call attention to the little bit of local color. Lenox at that time was in the beginning of its prolonged and friendly contest with Pittsfield for the primacy among the towns of the county, and it was thought the matter had been settled by the erection three years before (18 16) of the new county Court-house, now, and since 1874, the Public Library building, and known as Sedorwick Hall.

This is the edifice Silliman describes, and I append here the rest of the reference which the distinguished traveller makes to the town.

" I did not count the houses," he says, " but I should think there might be one hundred houses and stores. Its population is one thousand, three hundred and ten. White marble is often the material of their steps, foundations and pavements. Our treatment and dinner at the inn were such as a reasonable traveller would have been very well satisfied with, at a country tavern in England. Still probably no small town in England is so beautiful as Lenox."

Professor Silliman is rapturously enthusiastic over the scenery of this Berkshire region, even if, in the rather turgid style of Xenophon, he measures off the "parasangs" from town to town ; and so he passes on his way, seeing "the lofty Hoosac with its double summit" (Greylock) "on our right." It will be seen from the reference to the " inn " of that day, which stood upon the same site as the present substantial and commodious " Curtis Hotel," that this corner in the village has enjoyed for nearly if not quite a century a prestige for hospitality and the entertainment of distinguished travellers. The present hotel, entirely reconstructed within recent years, had for its predecessor on the same site a brick structure built in 1829 and called "The Berkshire Coffee-House," and it is specifically that house which has the literary associations of great names. Mrs. Kemble, even so far back as 1839, speaks of it as the " Old Red Inn " ; and Mrs, Jameson, the English author and the intimate friend of Miss Catherine Sedgwick, refers, in a letter to the latter, August 20, 1838, to "the little view of the hills from the window of the inn at Lenox where we used to sit.

It would be far from the purpose of this chapter to make a complete list of those books of description containing scattered references to Lenox, or its environment ; yet it would be a very grave omission not to see this region through the eyes of some of the English visitors who have from time to time come hither ; one of whom, Mrs. Kemble, to whom reference has been made, became so enamored with Berkshire as to make her residence in Lenox for years. The Lenox during the period of Mrs. Kemble's sojourn, 1836-53, is the subject of many references on the pages of her Records of Late7' Life. Mr. Samuel G. Ward, American representative of the Baring