I. Why this one matters
The South Berkshire directory reproduced elsewhere on this site is the best record of working people these towns have — and it does not cover Lenox. Ten towns, and not the one with the most estates in it. Every count taken from that book anywhere on this site carries the same apology.
This book covers Lenox. It also covers Stockbridge, so the two volumes can be read against each other three years apart.
II. The houses are addresses
That is the thing to understand before you start turning pages. In this volume a great house is not a subject. It is a street address, printed in quotation marks, and people are listed at it exactly as they are listed at 14 Church Street.
Auchmuty Ellen S., widow Richard T., h “The Dormers”, Pittsfield rd
Alexandre Helen L., widow John E., h “Springlawn”, Kemble
Field William B. Osgood, h “Highlawn”, Stockbridge
Girard Alice Miss, emp “Lithgow Cottage”, Stockbridge
Godwin Elizabeth L. Miss, “Brushwood Farm”, h Pittsfield rd
Elm Court appears thirty-eight times. Wheatleigh fourteen. Holmwood thirteen, Stonover twelve, Tanglewood eleven, Groton Place and Bellefontaine eight apiece. Those are not mentions in a story. Those are people, at those places, in 1926, with their trades printed after their names.
III. What is in it
Across the whole volume: eighty-two chauffeurs, fifty-nine gardeners, forty-six butlers, forty-three maids, thirty housekeepers, twenty-five cooks, twenty-one caretakers, fourteen florists — and twelve coachmen, thirty years after the trade peaked and two years after the last one disappeared from the Pittsfield book. In the hill towns they lasted a little longer.
And the trades are attached to employers. Abert Oral, (Emma) electrician, emp Henry W. Jones. Gilligan Edward J., (Mary) chauffeur, emp Dr. Bullard. Fielding Thomas P., (Annie K.) carpenter and builder, Tucker, h do — See page 159. A Lenox builder with his own advertisement, and a page reference to it.
IV. How to read it
Same conventions as the other two. h is the house they own; bds they board; rms they have rooms; emp gives the employer; do means ditto, the address just given; rem to means they had gone, and where. A wife’s name is in parentheses. The abbreviations are set out in the book itself, on page 65.
The scans are two-page spreads; they have been split here so a page is a page. Page numbering in the flip book runs straight through from the first leaf, so it sits about eight ahead of the printed page numbers in the Lenox section — jump to 190 and you land on printed page 182, where the Lenox names begin.
Central Berkshire County Directory, 1926, from the Pittsfield + Berkshire County MA Directory Collection at the Internet Archive; not in copyright. 248 scanned spreads, split into 496 pages and re-encoded for the web; the originals are at archive.org. Directory lines are quoted as printed, abbreviations and all. Counts are of occupation words across the whole volume, which covers nine towns, not Lenox alone. The other two volumes on this site are the South Berkshire directory of 1923–’25 and Briggs’s Berkshire County directory of 1874.