I. Turn to Lenox
Page 513 in this book is the beginning of the Lenox directory, and it is worth sitting with, because it is a photograph of the town taken from the wrong end of the cottage era.
Read down a column of it and you get farmers, and laborers, and carpenters, and then a run of the same surname doing the same thing — Hutchinson O. lime burner. Hutchinson J. lime burner. Hutchinson Oliver, lime. Hutchinson Sandford, lime. Hutchinson H. H., lime. Five men of one family burning limestone. Further on, Martin A. X., glass maker. Martin Jacob, glass maker. Judds and Mattoons and Millers farming, three Jennes and three Loomises and two Mahannas carpentering, and laborers by the score.
There is not a coachman on the page. Not a gardener, not a butler, not a laundress, not a chauffeur — that last one not yet invented. In 1874, Lenox is a town that burns lime, saws lumber, makes glass and works the land.
Twenty years later the same town is building Shadow Brook, and fifty years later Crowley & Lunt’s 1923 book is full of the trades that did not exist here in 1874. The two directories are the same county at either end of the thing this site is about.
II. What else is in it
A great deal, and most of it is not the listings. Briggs paid for the book with advertising, so the pages carry Pittsfield merchant tailors, insurance agents, writing inks sold on “DURABILITY! — PERMANENCY!”, kerosene oil and fixtures wholesale and retail, and the running heads keep up a patter of their own down the foot of every page.
Every town in the county is in it. Briggs canvassed all thirty-two, from Pittsfield over a hundred and fifty pages to New Ashford in barely one, and the book’s own Index to Directory on page 23 lists them. The town links above follow that index, alphabetically, under the names the book uses: Alford, Becket, Cheshire, Clarksburg, Dalton, Egremont, Florida, Great Barrington, Hancock, Hinsdale, Lanesborough, Lee, Lenox, Monterey, Mt. Washington, New Ashford, New Marlboro, North Adams, Otis, Peru, Pittsfield, Richmond, Sandisfield, Savoy, Sheffield, South Adams, Stockbridge, Tyringham, Washington, West Stockbridge, Williamstown and Windsor — and then the three street directories, for Pittsfield, Great Barrington and North Adams, which are separate sections listing houses by road rather than people by name.
Two names have moved since. South Adams is the town now called Adams: in 1874 Adams was one town with a village at either end, and North Adams was incorporated separately four years later, in 1878. Briggs canvasses the two halves as two directories and indexes them as two towns, which is why they are listed that way above. New Marlboro the book spells without the final ugh; Lanesborough it spells with it.
Farmers outnumber everybody — the word appears more than two and a half thousand times — then laborers, then five hundred-odd carpenters and two hundred and fifty teamsters.
III. One number, carefully
This book lists two hundred and two masons and one plasterer. So does the 1923 book, near enough. Two volumes fifty years apart agreeing on a figure that improbable is a warning about the source rather than a finding about the trade: a man who plasters was quite likely entered as a mason, or a laborer, or whatever word he gave the canvasser at his door. The directories are a census of what people called themselves, which is not the same as a census of what they did.
Briggs & Co., Berkshire County Directory for 1874 (Boston). Scanned by the Internet Archive; the copy reproduced here carries the bookplate of the Reynolds Historical Genealogy Collection, Allen County Public Library. Page images re-encoded for the web; the originals are at archive.org. Entries and advertisement wording quoted as printed. The town links above are taken from the volume’s own Index to Directory on page 23 and then located page by page in the scans; each lands on the page carrying that town’s section heading. Wikipedia, “North Adams, Massachusetts,” for the separate incorporation of North Adams in 1878. The two later volumes on this site are the South Berkshire directory of 1923–’25 and the Central Berkshire directory of 1926, which covers Lenox.