I. A line in a street list
The 1926 volume walks each town road by road. Stockbridge’s East Main Street is headed:
EAST MAIN STREET
From junction Main and East St. at Mellen Place east and north easterly to Lee Line at Backus Place
Down that walk the book drops the markers it uses for anything that is not a house: Main St. ends, Vine St. begins, East St. begins, White Bridge St. begins, South Lee rd begins, Swamp rd begins, Lee Town Line. Between Dr. William B. Terhune and Dr. Alvin W. Klien “The Crossways” there is one more, set flush left in exactly the same way:
Yale Hill
No householder, no house name, no begins or ends. The canvasser simply notes that the road has reached the hill, and carries on. Everything after it — and the hero image on this page is that column, unaltered — is on Yale Hill as the book understands it.
II. The book cannot decide what it is
Then the alphabetical section opens, and the trouble starts. Eighteen entries give somebody a Yale Hill address, and they do not agree about what Yale Hill is.
HAGUE ELEANOR MISS, h Yale Hill, E. Main
… Marion Miss, h Yale Hill, E. Main
… George Grenville Rev., (Pauline) M.A., B.D., Oxon, h “Yale Hill”, East Main
Sherwood A. W., (Amelia) summer res, h E. Main, “Yale Hill”
… Lawrence M., (Nellie S.) electrical work, machinist, sash, doors, also carpet dusting, h E. Main, “Yale Hill”
Read the first pair and Yale Hill is a locality — a part of East Main Street, set down exactly the way the book sets Lenox Dale or Glendale or Interlaken. Read the Reverend Merrill’s and it is a house: the quotation marks are the same ones the book puts round “The Crossways” and “Hillfields” and “Willow Grove”, and they sit in the same slot, before the street.
A century later, anyone compiling a list of Berkshire cottages out of these books has to choose, and the book has already made the mistake for them. “Yale Hill” looks like a cottage because the directory typesets it like one. It is a hill with about twenty houses on it, none of them called Yale Hill except in the entry of a clergyman who evidently thought it was.
III. Also carpet dusting
The best line on the hill belongs to the man whose name it carries.
YALE ELIZABETH A., widow William, bds E. Main
… Lawrence M., (Nellie S.) electrical work, machinist, sash, doors, also carpet dusting, h E. Main, “Yale Hill”
He takes a second entry in the classified pages — Yale Lawrence M., electrical work, machinist, sash, doors, also carpet dusting, East Main — and the street list has him between Frank Roy Jr. and Dr. F. C. Downing, on the right-hand side of the road.
Whether the hill is named after his family this book does not say, and neither will this page. What it does say is that in 1926 a Yale lived on Yale Hill and made his living from four trades at once, one of which was beating other people’s carpets. That is not the usual relationship between a Berkshire family and a Berkshire place-name, and it is the sort of thing a list of cottages loses.
IV. Who was actually on it
The twenty-odd households the street list walks past are not an estate row. They are small named houses, close together, and the names in them are worth reading slowly.
Dr. Alvin W. Klien “The Crossways” · James Spratt · South Lee rd begins · Harry Smith · Graham D. Wilcox · Edward L. Pilling · Edward J. Malumphy · Miss M. Adele Brewer “Hillside Home” · Frank Roy, Jr. · Lawrence M. Yale · Dr. F. C. Downing · Miss Marion Hague · Vacant · Mrs. Nina L. Duryea · Rev. George Grenville Merrill · Vacant House · Marie O. Kobbe “Hillfields” · Lydia F. Emmet · Frank L. Warrin “Wyndcote” · George Kohler · Walter Nettleton “Ramblewood” · Philip A. Means · Swamp rd begins
Lydia F. Emmet is Lydia Field Emmet (1866–1952), the portrait painter — a pupil of William Merritt Chase, trained at the Académie Julian, best known for her portraits of children, and a member of the Stockbridge Art Association.
Walter Nettleton “Ramblewood” is Walter Eben Nettleton (1861–1936), landscape and snow-scene painter, who came to Stockbridge as a boy when his father’s business brought the family back from Germany, worked briefly in a factory, and went from there to Yale.
Mrs. Nina L. Duryea is Nina Larrey Duryea (1874–1951), novelist, playwright and relief worker, decorated by several European governments for the work of the Duryea War Relief in France. Her alphabetical entry gives her house: h “The Old Mill”, E. Main, Yale Hill. It is a grist- and sawmill of about 1810 on Kampoosa Brook, which she was converting into a house in exactly these years. The directory catches her in the middle of it.
Philip A. Means is Philip Ainsworth Means (1892–1944), who moved to Stockbridge in 1924 to write and produced Ancient Civilizations of the Andes in 1931 — for a generation the standard book in English on the Inca. He is the last name on the hill before Swamp Road.
Two painters, a novelist and an Americanist, in four houses, with two vacancies between them. This is the other end of the same era the rest of this site is about: not Elm Court and not Eastover, but the people who came to the Berkshires to work and took a small house on a hill with a view.
V. The service side of a hill
Even here the pattern this section keeps finding holds. Two of the eighteen Yale Hill entries are working people, and only one of them gets an employer:
Spratt James, (Marion) gardener, h E. Main, Yale Hill
Fox Mae Miss, maid, emp Dr. F. C. Downing, bds E. Main, Yale Hill
James Spratt is a gardener with a house of his own on the hill and no employer printed after him — which could mean he worked for everybody on it, or for one household the canvasser did not ask about, or on his own account. The book does not say. Mae Fox is a maid, boarding with the doctor she works for, and hers is one of the very few entries in this volume that names a domestic servant and her employer in the same line.
The rest of the hill’s work is invisible in the usual way. Five Sherwoods share one summer house; the students among them are recorded as students. Nobody cooked for them, on the evidence of this book.
All entries, street list and headings from the Central Berkshire County Directory, 1926, from the Pittsfield + Berkshire County MA Directory Collection at the Internet Archive. Stockbridge street list, East Main Street, printed page 266; the alphabetical entries from the Stockbridge section, printed pages 277–300, with the classified entry for Lawrence M. Yale from printed page 303. Page numbers are the numbers printed on the pages; the whole volume can be read and searched here. Names, spellings, quotation marks and abbreviations are given as printed, including Kobbe without its accent and Klien as the book sets it; where the original breaks an entry across two lines it has been closed up, and continuation lines that omit the surname have had it carried down from the entry above, which is how the book is meant to be read. The two plates are unretouched crops from the Internet Archive scan of the volume, which is not in copyright, enlarged; the count of eighteen is of people given a Yale Hill address in the alphabetical section, not of lines. The reading of flush-left and indented names as the two sides of the road follows the book’s own Left Right heading at the top of each street. Lydia Field Emmet’s dates, training under William Merritt Chase and at the Académie Julian, her reputation as a portraitist of children and her membership of the Stockbridge Art Association are from Wikipedia and the National Academy of Design’s record of her. Walter Eben Nettleton’s dates, subjects and the family’s move to Stockbridge are from askART. Nina Larrey Duryea’s dates, her work as author, playwright and philanthropist, the Duryea War Relief, and the conversion of the roughly 1810 grist- and sawmill on Kampoosa Brook into a house in the 1920s are from The Berkshire Edge, “Then & Now: Duryea Mill in Stockbridge.” Philip Ainsworth Means’s dates, his move to Stockbridge in 1924 and Ancient Civilizations of the Andes (1931) are from Wikipedia. Identifications of the four are made on the strength of an uncommon name, the right town and the right years; none of the four is named as such in the directory, which prints only what is quoted above. Whether Yale Hill takes its name from the family of Lawrence M. Yale is not established here and is not claimed.