The Berkshires: Mountains at the Edge of New England

The Berkshire Hills rise gently along the western edge of Massachusetts, the last ridge of the Appalachian chain before the land flattens into the Hudson Valley and New York. They are old mountains, worn smooth by a billion years of erosion, covered in maple and birch forests that turn extraordinary colors in October. They have always been the part of Massachusetts that felt farthest from the ocean and closest to somewhere else.

The Mohican people, whom the English called the Stockbridge Indians, had lived in the Housatonic Valley for generations before the Puritan settlements reached this far west in the seventeen twenties. The mission town of Stockbridge was founded in seventeen thirty-four as an English experiment in peaceful coexistence. It lasted about thirty years before the Mohican were displaced westward.

In the nineteenth century, the Berkshires became a retreat for the wealthy of New York and Boston, who built enormous summer cottages they called cottages despite having forty rooms and thirty servants. Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick in a farmhouse near Pittsfield in eighteen fifty to eighteen fifty-one, looking out at Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts at about three thousand four hundred ninety feet. Nathaniel Hawthorne was living seven miles away at the same time. They visited each other regularly.

The cultural tradition deepened in the twentieth century. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, opened in Lenox in nineteen thirty-seven. Jacob's Pillow, the oldest dance festival in the United States, began in Becket in nineteen thirty-three. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as Mass MoCA, opened in the old Sprague Electric factory in North Adams in nineteen ninety-nine.

The Berkshires are what happens when old industrial New England and the natural world find each other again.