Shadow Brook Farm Historic District
Near Lenox, Massachusetts
In the eighteen nineties the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts were the summer playground of Gilded Age wealth, and Shadow Brook was its grandest statement. Anson Phelps Stokes, heir to a banking and copper fortune, built a mansion here near Lenox that was reputedly the largest private house in the United States at the time of its completion in eighteen ninety-three. Stokes had joined the family firm, Phelps Dodge and Company, as a teenager in eighteen fifty-five, and the house had about one hundred rooms.
The estate sprawled across hundreds of acres of woodland and meadow along a tributary of the Housatonic River. Stokes hosted the social elite of the era, the kind of guests who arrived by private rail car at Lenox station. The mansion itself burned in nineteen fifty-six, but six repurposed farm buildings from the estate survived and are part of the Shadow Brook Farm Historic District on the National Register.
Today the historic district is mostly the campus of Berkshire Country Day School, while nearby the Kripalu Center, a yoga and health retreat, occupies the Jesuit building that replaced the burned mansion. Stokes died in nineteen thirteen. Andrew Carnegie owned the estate at the end of his life and died there in nineteen nineteen, and in nineteen twenty-two the Jesuits bought it for a seminary.
The fire of nineteen fifty-six killed several people, and the Jesuits built the present building the following year.
