Bernard A. Drew

… Ye Holidays are just upon ye Towne and ye Boyes, of wh I counte mine owne selfe as I have beene payntinge ye Towne a gorgeous Crymson and have whooped it uppe...

There was public pressure for a better way to reach the Berkshire Heights interior. The grade-level Castle Street/railroad crossing was extremely dangerous.

In the shadows of big brothers and sisters, very small buildings served important purposes and have stories to tell. Sometimes rich stories.

Stockbridge — with the accent on “bridge” — has had more bridges over the Housatonic River than any of its neighbors, a remarkable 20 highway, foot, trolley and railroad spans. That’s as many as many as Great Barrington and Sheffield combined. Ten of Stockbridge’s bridges are still in use.

The good news of the trains was, they took our textile, paper, dairy and other products to market. The bad news was, the tracks crossed country roads.

The neighborhood known as Brooklyn was so-called because many guests at the Berkshire House hotel at the corner of Main and Bridge streets were from Brooklyn, N.Y., and it was hoped they could be persuaded to buy land and build homes there.

The earliest recorded moving of a house in Great Barrington is in 1793, when the town no longer needed its old courthouse, which stood in front of present Town Hall, and Captain Walter Pynchon moved it across the street to behind the Wheeler & Taylor office.

Town police had brought in machine guns from Hartford and kept them in the Town Hall basement, just in case violence erupted. Ted Hitchcock said an FBI agent hid in his attic — his house was encircled by the U-shaped park — with binoculars trained on the proceedings.

It is a fictional character created and drawn by a one-time Great Barrington resident who is most sought by comics collectors: Plastic Man, or Plas, as he's called by his sidekick, Woozy Winks.

There’s a recreation of the Little Red Cottage in Stockbridge where Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne lived for a couple of years on the north slope above Lake Mahkeenac, across from the present Tanglewood.

Many of the very oldest stones in the cemetery are unreadable today. If you rub some of the lichens off, you can still make out Ephraim Porter’s stone, though. He was a militiaman who died in a later conflict, Shays’ Rebellion.

Wasn’t entertainment so much simpler in 1925? Just scramble up the side of the building, and everyone in Great Barrington and their neighbors from Egremont, Sheffield and Monterey turn out to ooooh. (I know, they really had a little blood lust; they wanted to see if he’d fall.)

We are very anxious to have you attend and take the role of principal speaker of the evening. We also hope to have a short talk by Judge Hinman and Dr. Charles H. Painter, both of whom I think you know. You will find many of your old friends in attendance, and we think we can assure you of a good time. -- Clarence Sweet, superintendent of the Monument Mills in Housatonic, in a letter to W.E.B. Du Bois in 1925, inviting him to speak before the Alumni Association of Searles School

“The arrival of that first train is an event to be remembered; it had been expected in the afternoon of the preceding day, and hundreds of people had gathered in the street to witness it.” -- Historian Charles J. Taylor

Walking tour, interpretive trail, and public talk illuminate Du Bois in Great Barrington.

The public disdained using the new roadbed for several years. You can improve our roads, but you can’t make us use them, people declared silently. -- Reaction in 1812 to improvements in what would become Route 7