Stockbridge, The Mohican Mission Town
Near Lenox, Massachusetts
Stockbridge was founded in seventeen thirty-four as an experiment in missionary coexistence. Reverend John Sergeant arrived to live among the Mohican people, whose name for themselves, Muh-he-con-ne-ok, meant People of the Waters That Are Never Still. Sergeant built a mission house on the Housatonic in seventeen forty-two and, unusually for the era, learned the Mohican language and argued against the dispossession of his congregation's land.
His house still stands. The Stockbridge Mohicans were eventually pressured west and today are the Stockbridge-Munsee Band in Wisconsin. The town they left behind became an artists' colony, home to Norman Rockwell and a cluster of cultural institutions that make this Berkshire village, population just over two thousand, arguably the most culturally dense small town in New England.
