Hawthorne's Little Red House

Somewhere on these wooded slopes stood a small red farmhouse that gave the whole valley its name. In eighteen fifty, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne moved with his family into a modest red cottage on this hillside, and though he stayed only about eighteen months, those months were remarkably productive. Here Hawthorne finished The House of the Seven Gables, wrote a collection of retold Greek myths for children called A Wonder Book, and soon followed it with a second collection, Tanglewood Tales.

That title gave the surrounding estate, and later the great music festival, its enduring name. Hawthorne walked into the village of Lenox regularly to collect his mail. During his time here he also struck up a famous friendship with a younger writer who lived just over the hills in Pittsfield, Herman Melville.

Melville, then finishing his whale novel Moby Dick, admired Hawthorne deeply and dedicated that book to him. The two men talked literature and walked the Berkshire hills together. The original little red house is long gone, destroyed by fire in the eighteen nineties, but a replica marks its memory.

In a real sense, the cultural life that fills these hills today, the writers and musicians and audiences, traces back to the quiet productivity of Hawthorne's brief Berkshire stay.