West Stockbridge, Marble and the First Railroad West
Near Lenox, Massachusetts
West Stockbridge is a small Berkshire town with an outsized place in Massachusetts industrial history. Marble quarried here in the early eighteen hundreds supplied stone for the Massachusetts State House in Boston and the old City Hall in Lower Manhattan. Nine quarries were operating by eighteen thirty, with the marble sawn at the Crocker Mill on the Williams River.
The town's commercial life transformed in the early eighteen forties when the Western Railroad, connecting Boston to Albany, opened its full route in eighteen forty-one. The line was built partly to haul marble east faster than oxcarts could manage. It was the first rail line to cross the Berkshires, and West Stockbridge was the point where trains came down from the Canaan grade into the valley.
The quarries eventually gave out, but the rail corridor they helped create became Interstate Ninety.
