I. What you are looking at
Crowley & Lunt sent canvassers door to door and printed what they found: who lived in the house, what they did, who they did it for, and whether they had gone. It is the most complete record of working people in these towns that exists for the period, and it was produced entirely by accident, as a side effect of selling advertising.
The listings run alphabetically by surname, with the rest of the household indented beneath. A wife’s name appears in parentheses. h means the house is theirs; bds means they board; emp gives the employer; rem to means they had already gone, and where. Whole lives arrive and depart inside a single line of six-point type — Lynch George P (Mary J) gardener rem to Ireland — and the book sets them in the same face as everybody else, which is either the cruelty of the thing or its decency, depending on the morning.
II. The fun is in the ads
Thirty-nine leaves are pure advertising and another hundred carry it in the running heads, and this is not the boring part. It is the part where 1923 stops being a date and starts being a place with opinions.
Henry A. Stevens, Funeral Director — Auto Livery, whose banner rides the top of page after page, offering the town the same garage for its last ride and its next one. The optician on leaf 89: “When you break your glasses, bring them to me.” A grocer who will not oversell it: “If it’s good to eat, we have it.” A jeweller insisting his diamonds are bought right and sold right, in that order, which tells you what people had been asking him.
And on leaf 441, the directory turns and addresses you directly, having spent four hundred pages recording everyone else: “The City Directory records the history of your Commercial Life. Will you have it written Boldly, or just come in as ordinary information?” Nobody has written a better line about being in a database since.
III. Reading it against the houses
The estates are in here as employers. Search the Stockbridge run for Wheatleigh and twelve entries come up — a superintendent living on the place with his wife Celia, a florist, a gardener, a chauffeur, a teamster, laborers — and, a few lines away in the same alphabet, the Countess de Heredia herself, widow of Carlos, listed at the same address as the men who kept her greenhouses. The book does not rank them. It just runs A to Z.
Scanned by the Internet Archive from the University of Massachusetts Amherst copy. Crowley & Lunt, Great Barrington and Beverly, 1923–’25. Not in copyright. The volume covers the southern towns and not Lenox; for Lenox, Lee, Stockbridge and six more, see the 1926 Central Berkshire directory, and for the county nineteen years before Wheatleigh, the 1874 volume. The page images here are re-encoded for the web; the originals are at archive.org. The ten town sections have also been parsed into 2,329 worker records — name, trade, employer, and where they went — published here as a tab-separated file.