THE BERKSHIRE COTTAGES - A Vanishing Era
BY CAROLE OWENS

FOREWORD TO THE TRAVELER

I wrote this book for the simple reason that I wanted to read it. When I came to the Berkshires for the first time in 1979, I was thrilled by what I saw and tantalized by what I did not see, could not find, but had been told was there: "The Berkshires has been a famous summer resort for over a hundred years. It was the country seat of the very rich and powerful during the Gilded Age. Before that it was called the American Lake District - the home of the great poets and authors. Remnants of the past are all around you."

That year I was a traveler; seeing enough to believe what I had been told, but only enough to whet the appetite, not to satisfy. I wanted to a guide to tell me who built what, when, why, and for how much. I wanted a map to show what was hidden behind the walls of greenery, and where the nineteenth-century driveways into the Gilded Age lay off the twentieth-century roads. I wanted to go back in the evening to my room at the inn and read stories and anecdotes that would give me a glimpse into the life in the opulent settings that were the Berkshire cottages. There was no such book for sale. I looked, searched old book stores, made a nuisance of myself at the Stockbridge Library Historic Room. I found luscious crumbs but never a full meal. So I wrote it myself like the hungry person forced to cook at midnight.

Both Lenox and Stockbridge were founded in the 1700's. Between 1880-1910, at the venerable age of one hundred plus, Stockbridge and Lenox experienced a building boom that changed the landscape and the economy of the area. Stockbridge seems to have had deeper roots and hardly swayed in the effort of supporting the building boom of the Gilded Age. Lenox seems to become Lenox during the period and still reverberates with the memories and relics of the era. The most outrageous structures that best elucidate the state of mind of the late 1800s were built primarily in Lenox; so Lenox had more of a shock to absorb. It was a rush of carnival-like activity that left great architectural monsters behind in what had been Puritan woods and simple farm lands.

The manners and social gatherings decorated the age as surely as the tapestries. During that period, newspapers, magazines, and books dealt with every bit of social minutiae in the Berkshires. Columns in the newspapers had Stockbridge and Lenox datelines as well as Newport, Bar Harbor, Tuxedo Park, Saratoga, and later, Palm Beach. Names were misspelled, titles were granted by the fourth estate, dates for the building of cottages, locations, and even the name of the builders were often wrong. Society events were reported upon when possible and invented when necessary. It was an age never lacking for a superlative. At times, the errors were the result of the difficulty in getting information from a very exclusive upper class, and at other times the errors were calculated to prevent the truth from standing in the way of a good story. Some of the mistakes have been handed down from generation to generation.1 If libraries , newspapers, and chroniclers of the day made errors, so did this twentieth-century traveler. Whenever possible, errors have been corrected and hopefully new ones have not been made.

The builders and the caretakers of the great estates - those that gilded the age and those who polished it - were the subject of news stories then, and are the subject of daydreams and drama now. Never since the demise has the era of the people been treated quite seriously. The age has been criticized into ignominy or dramatized into fantasy. The relics of the age and the stories take on the aspect of set and plot in some period play. The times seem so different from our modern age as to be pure drama or melodrama. "History is written by the victors." The historians have been part of our current middle-class America. The age of elegance and gilt and uncountable wealth has been treated as an entertaining parenthesis to the history of America. I have tried to treat the subject matter seriously and factually; not as an entertaining aside, but as the antecedent of our world today. The era was colorful, gay and brief. The end of the era was catastrophic; world war followed by world-wide depression followed by world war. The age is over. The possibilities are to preserve our heritage, what is left of it, or, alternately, allow it to decay and vanish forever.

Part II of the book is a guide to the Berkshire cottages from one traveler to another. It is meant to enrich your visit by allowing you to be successful if you chose to go on a hunt through the Berkshire Hills for historic treasures. If you have come to Stockbridge or Lenox looking for gems of a past era, the last section of this book is your map.

1 - Recently, the Lenox Library published A Pride of Palaces, a collection of Edwin Hale Lincoln photographs of the great estates. On page 56, there is a picture of a room supposedly in Shadow Brook. It is actually a room in Elm Court and held Emily Vanderbilt Sloane's writing desk.