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• 1890s.net — the home pageThe Gilded Age in the Berkshires, in the sources: every parcel of the 1904 county atlas with its owner’s name, three county directories, a book of…
• About — the BerkshiresBerkshire County, Massachusetts. About 1890s.net.
• One name, seventy years — Berkshire records, 1858 to 1926Five surveys of the same county — the village plans of 1858, the directories of 1874, 1923 and 1926, and the atlas of 1904. Put a surname in and see it in all of them at once, in order, with the gaps left showing.

Books and maps, fully digitized and fully searchable

Every leaf at the size it was scanned, and every page read by machine so the words on it can be found. On the two maps the names are transcribed one by one — 14,848 off the atlas plates, and 3,822 off the 1858 village plans, each of those pinned to the house it stands on; in the three directories a hit comes back as the line on the page that holds it. Zoom any sheet until the smallest type is legible.

• Berkshire County in 1858 — Walling’s wall map, readHenry Walling surveyed Berkshire County and published it in 1858 as one enormous sheet — every road, every house on it named, forty-nine village plans around the margin, a printed trade directory and a panel of figures from the state census of 1855. Thirty years before the first cottage. This is what the ground looked like underneath.
• The county before — Berkshire County Directory, 1874Briggs & Co. canvassed the whole of Berkshire County in 1874 — nineteen years before Wheatleigh, twenty before Shadow Brook. Seven hundred and twenty-six pages of a farming county that did not yet know what was coming.
• Central Berkshire Illustrated, 1890 — Berkshire photographsA Pittsfield bookseller went round the four towns with a camera in 1890 and published the results as mounted photogravures — the river, the hotels, Main Street, and the great houses while they were still new. Thirty-seven plates, reproduced whole.
• The 1904 atlas of Berkshire County, MassachusettsBarnes & Farnham drew the whole county in 1904 — fifty-eight plates, thirty-two towns, about ninety villages — and put the owner’s name inside every boundary. Ten thousand nine hundred pixels wide. Every one of those names — 14,848 — has been read off the sheets and typed out. Open a plate and go in until you can read the smallest of them.
• • The 58 plates of the 1904 Berkshire County atlasThe book’s own table of contents, made to work: fifty-eight plates, thirty-two town plans and about ninety village plans, every one of them a link into the sheet.
  • Every name on the 1904 map of Berkshire CountyEvery name printed on all fifty-eight sheets — 14,848 parcels, houses, farms and marked features, read one at a time at full magnification and written down as the plate sets them. Thirty-two towns, from Clarksburg to Sheffield.
  • Who paid for the 1904 Berkshire County atlasFour pages at the back of the book list the people who subscribed to it, town by town, with a “Non-Residents” section at the end. A good many of them are the names on the plates, and here they come with their house names attached.
• • Adams, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map1,189 names read off the 6 sheets the atlas gives Adams — 20 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Alford, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map288 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Alford — 9 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Becket, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map258 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Becket — 8 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Cheshire, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map479 names read off the 2 sheets the atlas gives Cheshire — 10 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Clarksburg, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map345 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Clarksburg — 3 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Dalton, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map499 names read off the 2 sheets the atlas gives Dalton — 50 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Egremont, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map288 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Egremont — 9 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Florida, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map345 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Florida — 3 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Great Barrington, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on…1,483 names read off the 5 sheets the atlas gives Great Barrington — 43 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Hancock, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map210 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Hancock — 27 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Hinsdale, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map450 names read off the 2 sheets the atlas gives Hinsdale — 12 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Lanesboro, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map478 names read off the 2 sheets the atlas gives Lanesboro — 31 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Lee, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map654 names read off the 3 sheets the atlas gives Lee — 3 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Lenox, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map500 names read off the 7 sheets the atlas gives Lenox — 102 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Monterey, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map324 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Monterey — 1 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Mount Washington, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on…179 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Mount Washington — 6 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • New Ashford, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map210 names read off the sheet the atlas gives New Ashford — 27 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • New Marlboro, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map333 names read off the sheet the atlas gives New Marlboro — 7 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • North Adams, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map2,296 names read off the 6 sheets the atlas gives North Adams — 11 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Otis, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map324 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Otis — 1 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Peru, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map240 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Peru — 9 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Pittsfield, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map3,396 names read off the 11 sheets the atlas gives Pittsfield — 50 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Richmond, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map503 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Richmond — 8 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Sandisfield, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map244 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Sandisfield — 0 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Savoy, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map289 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Savoy — 3 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Sheffield, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map469 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Sheffield — 15 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Stockbridge, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map476 names read off the 3 sheets the atlas gives Stockbridge — 22 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Tyringham, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map179 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Tyringham — 6 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Washington, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map117 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Washington — 11 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • West Stockbridge, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on…503 names read off the sheet the atlas gives West Stockbridge — 8 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Williamstown, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map1,358 names read off the 6 sheets the atlas gives Williamstown — 35 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
  • Windsor, Berkshire County in 1904 — every name on the map289 names read off the sheet the atlas gives Windsor — 3 of them an estate, a farm or a named house, the rest parcels and the things the plate marks besides property.
• The South Berkshire Directory, 1923–’25Every household in Alford, Egremont, Great Barrington, Monterey, Mount Washington, New Marlboro, North Canaan, Sheffield, Stockbridge and West Stockbridge — name, trade, employer, street. Four hundred and forty-eight pages, and not one of them skipped.
• The Central Berkshire Directory, 1926Every other directory on this site stops at the Stockbridge line. This one goes up the hill — Lenox, Lee, Stockbridge, Becket, Richmond, Washington, Dalton, Hancock and Hinsdale — and it lists the estates as addresses.

The estates

Cottage-era places, one page each. Wheatleigh carries a set of stories of its own, listed under it.

• The Gilded Age estates of the BerkshiresCottage-era places, read from the Olmsted firm’s drawings and from photographs made while the owners were still in the house.
• The Bryant Homestead — Cummington, the BerkshiresTwo sheets of a poet’s farms, drawn in October 1891 from a survey taken in his lifetime, with the eight-month-old Trustees of Public Reservations named on the first of them. It took another thirty-six years for the land to reach them.
• The Crane Memorial — Dalton, the BerkshiresTwenty-eight drawings and an office photograph album for a marble colonnade and a fountain on a village lawn — the complete record of one job, from the first survey note to the prints taken in the month it was planted. Four thousand people came to the dedication, William Howard Taft among them.
• The Crane Museum — Dalton, the BerkshiresA company built a museum to its own beginning out of the rag room of its first mill, and the Olmsted Brothers laid out the ground around it. The office kept everything: photographs captioned against a wall that did not exist yet, three perspectives arguing whether to build it, and the published credit cut out of a magazine.
• Willow Brook — Dalton, the BerkshiresThe one Berkshire place where the money was made on the ground it bought. Six years of Olmsted drawings for a flower garden and a lilac hedge at the house of Zenas Crane — whose mills have supplied the paper of the American dollar since 1879 — and five consecutive Detroit Publishing negatives that photograph the whole town in one afternoon.
• The Winthrop M. Crane Jr. Garden — Dalton, the BerkshiresA flower garden laid out by Charles Downing Lay in 1917, photographed by the Olmsted office in August 1929, and redesigned in the eighteen months that followed — three perspectives of one wall on one day, a lead figure drawn at three inches to the foot, and a print the client took home and dimensioned himself.
• Brookside — Great Barrington, the BerkshiresThe inventor of the alternating-current transformer lost this house to a fire and rebuilt it in concrete, then lost the money to a patent suit. The next owner finished it and hired a Florentine to make the gardens — which survive only in eight hand-colored lantern slides, because the gardens themselves were taken out in 1975.
• Allen Winden — Lenox, the BerkshiresA New York banker named his house after a village above Zurich and set it over Laurel Lake. Fifteen plates survive, including one of the estate managers sitting in their own parlor, named.
• Bellefontaine — Lenox, the BerkshiresCarrère & Hastings built it for Giraud Foster between 1896 and 1898, with a nod to the Petit Trianon. He lived in it until he died at ninety-four; it burned four years later, and the shell became Canyon Ranch.
• Belvoir Terrace — Lenox, the BerkshiresTwelve Olmsted sheets drawn in one summer of 1888 for Morris Ketchum Jesup — banker, president of the American Museum of Natural History, and the man who paid for Peary’s Arctic expeditions. Rotch & Tilden built the house. It has been a girls’ arts camp since 1954, and it is still standing.
• Blantyre — Lenox, the BerkshiresA turpentine fortune, a house sketched on the back of an envelope, and a wing built to hold the pictures — fifty-four of which were taken down and photographed one by one in 1912.
• The paintings at Blantyre — the BerkshiresEvery frame in the house carried an engraved brass plaque, and at full resolution the plaques read. Corot twice, a Millet, a Turner, three Gainsboroughs and four panels under Constable’s name — forty-two painters, named by the Patersons’ own framer and legible for the first time since the pictures left the building.
• Brookhurst — Lenox, the BerkshiresEdith Wharton’s cousin built the second house here in 1908, and his son’s forty-six acres became one of the oldest modernist studios in Massachusetts. In February 1938 somebody photographed the whole estate by elevation — residence, gates, superintendent’s house, tenant’s house, ice house, wagon shed, cow barn.
• Coldbrooke — Lenox, the BerkshiresBuilt by the man who wrote the first major book on torpedo warfare and then raised the money for the Great Northern Railway. Two inscriptions on the backs of prints carry its whole story: “Coldbrooke, 1882, Mr. John S. Barnes,” and, later, “St. Joseph’s Hall - Cranwell.”
• The Dormers — Lenox, the BerkshiresColonel Richard T. Auchmuty designed Trinity Church, the town hall and the water works at Lenox, founded the New York Trade Schools, and built himself this house. Five of the twelve surviving photographs are stereographs — three of them of the dining room.
• Erskine Park — Lenox, the BerkshiresGeorge Westinghouse’s summer house, finished by 1893, lit by its own generator and surrounded by ponds. Sold in 1917 and pulled down; a Colonial Revival house stands on the site.
• Ethelwynde — Lenox, the BerkshiresBuilt for an American ambassador, bought in 1893 by the parents of the man who would build Groton Place, and rebuilt in granite in 1930. One of its photographs is a measured floor plan with a title block — and that title block explains the winter surveys at Brookhurst and The Mount as well.
• Fairlawn — Lenox, the BerkshiresAdele Kneeland owned it in her own right, and the photographers spent their plates on her garden — including one of nothing but the sundial.
• The Frelinghuysen house — Lenox, the BerkshiresA Secretary of State’s widow and three of his children built on Kemble Street. The Olmsted office graded the lot for them, and kept the site notes, the plant order and eleven pages of arithmetic with the drawings.
• Groton Place — Lenox, the BerkshiresCarrère & Hastings built it for a collector who left four thousand works of art to Harvard. The hundred surviving negatives are almost all garden — grass, evergreen and stone, and not one flower.
• Hillingdon — Lenox, the BerkshiresForty-four Edwin Hale Lincoln negatives — the house from every side, the borders, the library, the staircase, the bedrooms, and a log cabin with its own rooms. The fullest record of any place in this survey, and the least known. If you recognize it, this page would like to hear.
• The Homestead — Lenox, the BerkshiresThe Olmsted firm’s first Berkshire job. Eleven sheets for Julia Appleton of Boston, drawn from McKim, Mead & White’s plan by an office that signed one of them F.L. Olmsted. The architect married the client, she died eighteen months later, and in 1905 the house burned in three and a half hours.
• Hotel Aspinwall — Lenox, the BerkshiresThe cottages were built so a few families could have the view to themselves. The Aspinwall sold it by the week to four hundred people at a time. It stood twenty-nine seasons on the ridge north of Lenox and burned in an hour.
• Interlaken — Lenox, the BerkshiresEight plates of the Bishop house above Laurel Lake, made in the winter the son of the house was offering $250 to the first four people who could fly a kilometer. He pulled the house down in 1922, and the house he built in its place came down in 1940.
• The Mount — Lenox, the BerkshiresEdith Wharton wrote the book on houses and then built one, and the Olmsted office never worked here. What survives instead is a numbered, building-by-building photographic survey of the whole estate made on one winter day in January 1940 — greenhouse, coach barn, ice house, wagon shed, hen house — and four midsummer views taken eighteen months later.
• Pinecroft — Lenox, the BerkshiresEleven of the thirty-seven surviving photographs of this Lenox estate are of hay and wheat. The rest include the coachman by name, and nine men with bats: “The Pinecroft invincible nine. George W. Ferguson Captain.”
• Shipton Court — Lenox, the BerkshiresFourteen plates of one summer. Ten are the house, its garden and its rooms; the other four are paintings, carried out onto the grass and photographed in daylight — one of them a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer.
• Spring Lawn — Lenox, the BerkshiresGuy Lowell built it for John E. Alexandre in 1904, and somebody photographed it room by room about a year later. A developer has since proposed pulling it down and building a copy.
• Stonover — Lenox, the BerkshiresA Victorian house of 1875, turned French by Delano & Aldrich in 1921 for two unmarried sisters — then bought by the neighbors after the last of them died, and taken apart because it blocked the view.
• Ventfort Hall — Lenox, the BerkshiresJ. P. Morgan’s sister built it, Rotch & Tilden designed it, and the photographs that survive are mostly of other people — the painters, the carriage men, the gardeners, and a baby in a pram with a dog.
• Wyndhurst — Lenox, the BerkshiresJohn Sloane bought Beecher’s hill in 1893, pulled down the house on it, and had Peabody & Stearns build a Tudor one — with the grounds drawn by the same firm, in the same years, that was drawing Wheatleigh four miles away.
• Elm Court — Lenox and Stockbridge, the BerkshiresBuilt from 1885 for William Douglas Sloane and Emily Thorn Vanderbilt. The house is by Peabody & Stearns. The grounds are by the Olmsted firm, twice — in 1885–86 for Mrs. Sloane, and in 1924–29 for the same woman as Mrs. Henry White.
• Tanglewood — Lenox and Stockbridge, the BerkshiresTwo houses on one hill above the Stockbridge Bowl: Highwood, finished in 1845 for a twenty-seven-year-old banker, and the Tappan place, which took its owners fifteen years to build. Between them stood a red farmhouse where Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables and quarrelled with his landlady about an orchard. The estate is named after his book.
• The village work — Lenox and Stockbridge, the BerkshiresTwo towns hired the office that had spent thirty years drawing the hills above them. Lenox wanted a small park on Main Street and got sixty-seven kinds of plant on one sheet; Stockbridge wanted the ground by the railroad station, and got two schemes, a grading plan down to the catch basins, and a photograph album that argues its case in the snow.
• Blythewood — Pittsfield, the BerkshiresA Chicago lawyer going blind bought four hundred and fifty acres above Pittsfield to get well in. The Olmsted office drew him seventy-five sheets — and gave nine of them to a water tower.
• The Franklin Weston Place — Pittsfield, the BerkshiresSheets 1, 3, 9 and 18 of a job that ran to at least eighteen. A survey bought from a Pittsfield engineering office, a preliminary plan gone over in pencil, and a formal garden drawn at four feet to the inch with a planting list of eighty-two numbers.
• The Ogden and West Places — Pittsfield, the BerkshiresTwo jobs, two clients, one piece of ground. Ten sheets laid out in a single winter by F.L. Olmsted & Co. — and five of them are planting lists that name every shrub, what it cost and which nursery it came from.
• Beckwithshaw — Stockbridge, the BerkshiresThree names for one hill. Built in 1892 as the Manor of Beckwithshaw, renamed Shaughlin by the Hills, and called Bonnie Brier only from 1916 under the Hannas. The Olmsted firm laid out the grounds in the autumn of 1905 — nine sheets, from the entrance drive to a watercolor garden — and Tanglewood began here in 1934.
• The Butler House (Swann Cottage), Stockbridge — the BerkshiresBuilt in 1894 for a New York lawyer whose firm gave Stockbridge three summer families; his daughter’s house; sold in 1924 to become the Martin Inn; now the Austen Riggs Center. The one brick house on its stretch of Main Street in 1904, and not one photograph of it from before Riggs.
• Eden Hill, Stockbridge — the BerkshiresDavid Dudley Field’s hilltop; a Washington merchant’s house of 1906; a steamship man’s cellar of contraband; a boys’ school; and since 1943 the Marian Fathers. For most of that time the oldest house in Stockbridge stood on its lawn.
• Naumkeag — Stockbridge, the BerkshiresStanford White built the house and Nathan Barrett made the grounds. Forty years on, Mabel Choate and Fletcher Steele spent thirty years rebuilding the gardens around them — and the Olmsted office, which has two Choate jobs on file, designed the grave rather than the garden.
• Orleton Farm — Stockbridge, the BerkshiresA working farm with its name in quotation marks, seventh of eighteen houses on Lenox Middle Road — and the one Berkshire place on this site that is still held by the family that bought it in the cottage era.
• The Red Lion Inn, Stockbridge — the BerkshiresThe inn burned to the ground in the summer of 1896 and was rebuilt the next year “as much as possible like the old one.” The owner was a woman whose first name nobody prints, a collector of colonial china whose niece was Mary Heaton Vorse. A man named Heaton said he had bought the house in 1862. The town’s history says a Plumb did.
• Shadow Brook — Stockbridge, the BerkshiresAnson Phelps Stokes’s hundred-room house above the Stockbridge Bowl, finished in 1893 and, until Biltmore, the largest private house in the country. Andrew Carnegie died in it; the Jesuits made it a novitiate; it burned in 1956.
• Villa Virginia, Stockbridge — a Berkshire estateThe villa is ten years too late for the 1904 atlas. What the atlas holds is the farm underneath it — lettered “GLEN BURNIE”, with a doctor on it who has been missing from the published account, and a second holding up the road that turns out to be the cattle operation the National Register describes.
• Wheatleigh, Stockbridge — Olmsted in the BerkshiresBuilt in 1893 and 1894 for Henry Harvey Cook, from drawings that begin in 1892. The house is by Peabody & Stearns; the grounds by Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, whose job 01295 runs to forty-seven drawings.
• • Three Families and a Firm — Wheatleigh — Stockbridge, the…Who built Wheatleigh, who lived in it, and who drew the ground it stands on — and why the drawings are catalogued under the wrong name and the wrong town.
  • Seven Plants Olmsted Specified That Massachusetts Now BansThe 1894 planting list for the Wheatleigh gate names roughly a hundred kinds of tree, shrub and vine. Seven of them can no longer be bought or planted in this state.
  • What Happened to the Trees Olmsted Ordered — Wheatleigh…Twenty-seven American chestnut. Eleven American elm. Thirty-five white ash. Read the 1894 list now and it is a casualty report.
  • The Road Was Moved, and Then It Was Planted — Wheatleigh…In the autumn of 1893 a public way through Stockbridge was taken up and laid down somewhere else. Thirteen months later the Olmsted office planted the new one.
  • The Burying Ground That Nobody Owns — Wheatleigh…A Stockbridge farm family stopped burying their dead here around 1850. Forty years later the most famous landscape office in America measured the plot to the inch and drew a line around it. Today the town mows it.
  • What Was There Before — Wheatleigh — Stockbridge, the…A hundred and sixty-five acres, two buildings, a burying ground, and a boundary cornered on an American chestnut. The Olmsted office drew Wheatleigh straight on top of it.
  • The Tower Is a Water Tower — Wheatleigh — Stockbridge, the…One sheet in the Olmsted file is a blueprint, and it is not a landscape drawing at all. It is the estate's plumbing — a spring, a pump house, a buried brick vault, and two thousand gallons standing at elevation 229.
  • What It Took — Wheatleigh — Stockbridge, the BerkshiresTwenty-eight thousand plants, most of them counted off the sheets. Then the harder question: how many days of work, with the tools of 1893, to find them, cart them, set them out on a hundred and sixty-five acres, move the ground and a public road to receive them, and keep them alive.
• The Sidney Howard Farm — Tyringham, the BerkshiresFour Olmsted Brothers sheets for the playwright who wrote the screenplay of Gone with the Wind . A cow barn, a tennis court and an old mill dam, surveyed in October 1938 — and a sketch for the entrance drive dated nineteen days before he died in the yard.
• The paintings at Blantyre — the BerkshiresEvery frame in the house carried an engraved brass plaque, and at full resolution the plaques read. Corot twice, a Millet, a Turner, three Gainsboroughs and four panels under Constable’s name — forty-two painters, named by the Patersons’ own framer and legible for the first time since the pictures left the building.

The work

The people who designed, built and ran these houses, trade by trade.

• Who built the Berkshire estates — trade by tradeThese houses took thousands of people to design, to build, and then to run — and almost none of them were written down. What the archives do hold, trade by trade, in the order a house came into being.
• Designing it — the BerkshiresBefore a stone was cut somebody had to draw it. The offices that took the commission, the draftsmen who signed the sheets, and the New York firms that decided what the rooms would look like.
• • Olmsted jobs in the Berkshires — Sixty-three jobsEvery story on this site is read out of one office’s files, and until now the shape of those files has been asserted rather than shown. Here is the register itself, town by town — including one job that had gone missing because somebody spelled Lenox with two n’s.
  • Stair snow melting — the BerkshiresSix hundred and sixty-eight plans and sixty-one years. Job 00318 is the largest Olmsted commission in Berkshire County by a factor of six, it is a third of every drawing the office made here — and seventy per cent of it was drawn after the Second World War.
  • Berkshire estate architects — Four offices, and a man from…Forty estates, and almost all of the architecture comes out of five drawing rooms — two in Boston, two in New York, and one over a street in Pittsfield.
  • Berkshire estate draftsmen — J. E. Titus, Del.Sixty-three Olmsted jobs in this county and one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two plans in them. The men who drew the sheets signed the sheets — which is more than the men who built from them ever got.
  • The Olmsted office in the Berkshires — Please returnSixty-three job files in this county, and they are not folders of designs. They are everything the office gathered, borrowed, annotated and kept — including a tourist map from the Red Lion Inn and a state highway plan drawn eighteen years before the job opened.
  • Furnishing the Berkshire estates — The rooms arrived cratedThe architect drew the walls. What went on them, in front of them and over them came from four or five New York houses that were not shops at all, but manufactories with a shopfront on Fifth Avenue.
• Building it — the BerkshiresGround, water, stone, timber, iron. The trades that put the shell up, in the order the season allowed — and, in two towns, the public buildings and the current that came with them.
• • Berkshire estate earthworks — Grade 76 to grade 198Before a stone was laid, somebody had to reshape the hill, drain it, move a public road off it, find the water and get the water uphill. The drawings for all of that survive, and they are exact.
  • Berkshire estate stonework — The men on the stepsA hundred and more of them, sitting on the rubble in front of the house they were building, photographed once and named nowhere.
  • Berkshire estate carpenters — Cut to a tolerance that assumes…A hundred and forty-four carpenters in South County in 1923, and a stair that has to be right the first time, in a material that never stops changing size.
  • Berkshire estate roofs and plumbing — The roof was a…Three Berkshire towns printed a trade directory in 1926 and all three have a heading for roofers. Not one of them has a roofer who is only a roofer. The roof belonged to the sheet-metal shop, and the sheet-metal shop belonged to the plumber.
  • Berkshire estate heat, light and water — Wires on the elm…Great Barrington had alternating current in 1886. Within ten years the houses on the hill were making their own, and every one of them needed a man in the cellar who understood it.
  • Electric light in the Berkshires — Stanley, 1886In March 1886 a Berkshire village got what the IEEE calls the first practical system in the world for lighting by alternating current — generated at one pressure, sent down a street, stepped down to another at the lamps. The number usually quoted for what ran along Main Street is not the one in the sources, and the man who did it left a sentence saying so.
  • Pittsfield Union Station — a Berkshire depot, 1866–1968In 1866 the Massachusetts legislature let a railroad put a station across West Street in Pittsfield, and West Street was discontinued where it crossed the tracks. The building stood for forty-eight years, its replacement for fifty-four, and the ground around both was cleared twice. The 1904 atlas draws all of it while it was still there.
• Finishing it — the BerkshiresThe part that took the longest and shows the most: plaster, carving, glass, and the marks left by the hands that did it.
• • Berkshire estate plasterers — The winter nobody could hurryBrick, lath and plaster went in wet, and then the house had to stand and dry. No amount of money moved that date. It is the one part of building these places that the owners could not buy their way past.
  • Berkshire estate wood carvers — Wood carversThe 1926 Lenox directory has a trade heading for wood carvers. One firm is listed under it. The same firm is listed under nineteen other headings, and its own advertisement does not mention carving.
  • Textiles in the Berkshire estates — Faded on purposeBrussels once had fifteen thousand weavers in it. By the time these houses went up there were perhaps three hundred left in the world, and a new works on the Bronx River trying to make it four hundred.
  • Tiffany glass in the Berkshires — No part of it done…Corona was built in 1893, the year Wheatleigh was built. What it took to get a sheet of glass out of a Long Island furnace and into a wall in the Berkshires.
  • Makers’ marks in the Berkshires — Where the names areAlmost every person named anywhere in this section was found on a mark, not in a history. Here is where the marks are, and what it takes to read them.
  • Three ways to spend it — the BerkshiresThe same money, the same decade, four miles apart. One house bought finished rooms from New York. One bought tapestries nobody has since identified. One bought barns, horses and a five-thousand-dollar motor car and left the walls as boards.
• Running it — the BerkshiresA finished house is a payroll. Inside and out, the people who made these places work once the builders had gone.
• • Berkshire estate servants — The rooms rarely photographedThe Lenox archive holds dining rooms, drawing rooms, halls and libraries by the hundred. It holds not one kitchen, laundry, scullery or servants’ hall. The absence is the record.
  • Berkshire estate gardeners — Thomas Proctor’s tomatoesThe head gardeners of the Berkshires grew fruit out of season in a cold county, kept a society, took medals in New York, and were photographed like a board of directors. Which, in their own estimation, is what they were.
  • Who had glass — every greenhouse on the 1904 Berkshire mapThe 1904 atlas gives greenhouses a color of their own in the key, which means the whole county’s glass is on the map and nobody has ever counted it. Reading all fifty-eight plates turns up 40 ranges , holding about 96 individual houses, in eight towns.
  • Berkshire estate coachmen — The last coachmenEight of them left in South County by 1923, against seventy-eight chauffeurs. A trade that took twenty years to learn, ended inside the working life of the men who had it.
  • Rolling the road — the BerkshiresEverything you assume about a nineteenth-century winter is backwards. They did not clear the snow away. They wanted it, and they packed it down. And the bells on the harness were not for Christmas — they were the law.
  • A Working Farm — the BerkshiresOrleton Farm has had five owners since the Revolution and only one line of business. The last time it sold was 1901. In the Berkshires, that is the rare part.
  • Berkshire estate farms — The farm buildings came firstSeven hundred and fifty-six farmers and three hundred farmhands in ten towns, against eight coachmen. These were not houses with grounds. They were farms with a house on them.
  • Wages in the Berkshires — The coin of the realmIt is said at Elm Court that every employee was given a gold coin at the end of the season. This site has not found a document that says so. What it can do is say exactly what the coin would have been — and what it was worth against a month’s wages.
• The people themselves — the BerkshiresThe year they worked, the houses they slept in, the places they went when it ended — and the two books that record more working people in these towns than anything else that survives.
• • Naming the Berkshire estate workforce — Everyone named164 people appear by name in this section with a trade, a house or a mark attached to them. 130 of them have an occupation printed beside the name. 34 do not.
  • Work in Berkshire County — Twelve weeks out of workThe directories record who was employed at a house and almost never what they did. The federal census records what every person did, who they lived with, where they were born, and how many weeks of the previous year they had no work at all. It has been free to read the whole time — and it was taken in April, which turns out to matter a great deal.
  • The paper mills of Lenox Dale, Berkshire CountyThe 1926 directory says emp Valley Mill and stops. Sixteen years earlier the census went down the same street and asked what people actually did there — and got rag cutter, sorter, finisher, foreman, and a great many girls of fifteen and seventeen.
  • Elm Court staff, Lenox, in the Berkshires — Emp Elm CourtTwenty-eight people worked at Elm Court in 1926 and can be named. Eight of them have a trade printed after the name. Three more are placed at the farm without one. The other seventeen have only the house.
  • Highlawn Farm staff, Lenox, in the Berkshires — Emp HighlawnElm Court straddles two towns and this site had to learn that the hard way. Its neighbor straddles three, and the 1926 directory enters it under four different names. Thirty-seven working people, a boarding house of its own, and an Olmsted job with nothing in it.
  • West Street, Lenox, in the Berkshires — The Two HawthornesIn 1926 Lenox had a Hawthorne Street and Stockbridge had a Hawthorne Street, and the book that printed both never mentions the other. Add Lenox’s West Street, which runs to the same town line, and one stretch of ground gets walked twice from opposite directions ninety pages apart — which is how a doctor ends up with two addresses, a house with three names, and a superintendent with a single entry between them.
  • Eastover, Lenox, in the Berkshires — Supt., East overEastover kept sixty-four servants. The directory that walked every door in Lenox in 1926 names eight people who worked there — and four of them live in a row on the other side of the road, past the schoolhouse.
  • Yale Hill, Stockbridge, in the Berkshires — Yale HillYale Hill turns up on lists of Stockbridge cottages. It is not one. In the 1926 directory it is a line in a street list, like a bridge or a crossing — and then a run of twenty households that includes two painters, a novelist in a converted grist mill, a historian of the Incas, and a man named Yale who dusted carpets.
  • Berkshire mill workers — Emp Valley MillThree miles from Elm Court is a town that made paper, marble, lime and the machinery to make paper with. Its classified directory has headings no resort town would print. And its workers, unlike the gardeners on the hill, are given no trade at all.
  • Not one gardener — the BerkshiresIn 1874 Lenox had 158 farmers, 120 laborers, seventeen paper makers, four glass makers and six men who burned lime. It had no gardener, no chauffeur, no coachman, no butler, no housekeeper and no maid. Not few. None.
  • The trades of Berkshire County — 1911Fifty-five Pittsfield directories, 1882 to 1943, counted trade by trade. In 1911 there were twenty-two coachmen in the book and twenty-three chauffeurs. That is the year the line crosses, and it never crosses back.
  • Winter work in the Berkshires — Two feet of snow on the groundEverything in this section had a season, and the season was not negotiable. Read the dates on the drawings and the calendar comes out whole.
  • Where Berkshire estate staff lived — Three bedrooms and a bathSixty-two per cent of the indoor staff boarded where they worked. Three-quarters of the carpenters owned a house in the village. One abbreviation in a directory tells you which life you had.
  • Leaving the Berkshires — Rem to IrelandTwo hundred and eighteen working people in one directory are recorded as gone, with the place they went printed after their names. Ninety-four of them left the county.

Elsewhere on the site

• Before — the ground before the cottage era — the BerkshiresThe rest of this site begins with a survey. This section is what was here first — the ground, its owners, and the documents by which it changed hands, back beyond the earliest map the other pages are built on.
• The capital — the BerkshiresTwo sources a hundred and thirty-nine years apart put the capital of the Mohican nation on the same piece of Main Street. One is a boundary study printed in 1886. The other is a timeline drawn in 2025 to raise money for the building that now stands on it.
• Of more interest, if not actually of greater importanceIn 1885 a Pittsfield man read a paper on where the Massachusetts–New York line ought to run. He spent the next year proving it, and said in his own preface that what he found along the way might matter more. He was right. He had established that the capital of the Mahican nation stood in Stockbridge, and that the patent which first took the land looks, on the face of its own petition, like fraud.
• Not to molest them in any manner whatever — the BerkshiresIn 1783 the Commander in Chief wrote the Mohicans a sealed testimonial to carry out of the town that had been chartered for them. In 1830 a surveyor working under an order of the Legislature lettered a swamp at that town’s southern edge with the name of its Black community — a name the town’s own deeds already used. Within a generation the name is off the map and the ground is a farm.
• The inns came first — the BerkshiresThe Berkshires take visitors, and the usual account has that beginning with the cottages. Two maps forty-six years apart say otherwise: the county had 6 hotels and 1 boarding house in its villages in 1858, thirty years before the first cottage, and the Gilded Age at its height had barely more.
• Wa’thatinik — the BerkshiresOn 26 September 2024 a footbridge at the mouth of Ice Glen was dedicated, and the dedication was spoken in a word that was the ordinary name of this country before any of the rest of it. It was written and read by Patrick White, then a member of the Stockbridge Select Board and the creator of this site. The text is reproduced here as it was read.
• Pictures and permissions — the BerkshiresEverything on this site comes from a public archive, and every picture is credited on the page it appears on. This page says where each body of material comes from, and how to reach me about any of it.