Lenox, the Inland Newport

As you move through Lenox, look at the scale of some of these houses, because for roughly forty years this small hill town was one of the most fashionable resorts in America, a place people called the Inland Newport. In the decades between the Civil War and the First World War, wealthy families from New York and Boston discovered the Berkshires. Unlike the seaside at Newport, Rhode Island, which was favored in high summer, Lenox drew its crowds in autumn, when the ocean had cooled and the hills blazed with color.

Great fortunes, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, the Sloanes, and many others, built lavish estates they modestly called cottages, though some ran to dozens of rooms. Leading architects of the age, firms like McKim, Mead and White and Rotch and Tilden, designed them, and at the peak of the era dozens of these mansions stood in and around Lenox. Fields were cleared to open sweeping views, and the social season filled the town with balls, carriage parades, and elaborate entertainments.

The First World War and the arrival of the federal income tax gradually ended the extravagance, and many cottages were later torn down or repurposed. But survivors like The Mount and Ventfort Hall still testify to the astonishing wealth that once summered in these hills.