About
About this site
Most of what has been written about the Berkshire cottage era is about the people who owned the houses. This site is a record of the houses — and of everyone else: the draftsmen, masons, gardeners, coachmen and maids who built and ran them, and the county they stood in.
It began with the Olmsted firm’s drawings for Wheatleigh and Elm Court and widened to the landscapes, the village work, and the records of the towns around Lenox and Stockbridge.
Everything here comes from a public archive — the Olmsted Archives at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, the Lenox Library Association through Digital Commonwealth, the Boston Public Library and the Library of Congress. Every picture is credited on the page it appears on, and Pictures and permissions says where each body of material comes from. Nothing here is asserted without a source, and where the record is uncertain or contradicts itself the page says so.
This research compiled by Patrick White. Comments, corrections and questions are welcome — there is a form below.
What is in it
- 46 estates, with what is known of the building, the grounds and the people who worked there.
- 41 stories on the work itself — designing it, building it, finishing it, running it, and the county around it.
- Five books reproduced whole, page by page: three county directories, a book of photographs from 1890, and the atlas of 1904 — 1,670 leaves, searchable word by word.
- Two maps read name by name: Walling’s wall map of 1858 and the Barnes & Farnham atlas of 1904.
- 37,945 names, across all five surveys. 15,118 of them are transcribed record by record out of the two maps — every parcel on the 1904 atlas, and all 270 householders on the forty-nine village plans of 1858, each one pinned to the corresponding house. The other 22,827 are entries in the three directories, found by searching the page they are printed on.
A name is an entry, not a person: anyone who appears in two surveys is counted twice, and the site never claims two entries are the same family. The directory figure counts lines in the machine-read text shaped like a directory entry — a surname, a given name, a trade. It is deliberately strict and undercounts. Those three volumes have not been transcribed into records the way the two maps have.
Where to start
- One name, seventy years — all five surveys searched at once, in date order, with the gaps left showing.
- The county before the cottages — forty-nine village plans of 1858, every householder pinned to the corresponding house.
- Search every word — the site and all five books together.
- Contents — everything on the site, on one page.
Ask a question
If you hold rights in a picture here, if something on a page is wrong, or if you are looking for a house, a name or a parcel and cannot find it, write and I will answer.
Doing this somewhere else
The processes used to create this site have been meticulously documented — how the maps were read, how the books were made searchable, how a name printed on a page was tied to a place on a plate. The same processes can now be applied to just about any historical record, in any region of the country. If that is of interest for your own town or society, write to patrickwhitestockbridge@gmail.com.