Church on the Hill

This white steepled meetinghouse is the Church on the Hill, one of the finest surviving Federal period churches in the Berkshires. The congregation was gathered in seventeen sixty nine, in the earliest days of the town, and its first small meeting house went up the following year. As Lenox grew, that first building proved too small, and in eighteen oh five the local builder Benjamin Goodrich raised the graceful structure you see now, working from designs associated with the noted architects Asher Benjamin and Charles Bulfinch.

It was dedicated on the first day of eighteen oh six. The congregation belongs today to the United Church of Christ. Around and behind the church lies the town's first burying ground.

Lenox set aside about three acres for a cemetery in seventeen seventy, and the first burial took place the next year. Wander among the weathered stones and you will find the graves of the town's early settlers, of Revolutionary War veterans, and of Civil War soldiers, a record in slate and marble of the people who built this community. For much of its life the Church on the Hill has been the visual anchor of Lenox, its tall white spire rising above the village and the surrounding hills as a landmark visible for miles.