About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the 21st century.
In the mid-19th century, the Berkshires was dubbed “the American Lake District.” Both Henry Ward Beecher and Herman Melville are credited with naming it. It is less important who thought of it first and more important what the new name meant. In part it reflected the physical beauty of Berkshire County and its similarity to the Lake District in England, but equally the name told of the influx of a large number of American writers and painters. Herman Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, George Inness, Frederick Church, William Cullen Bryant, Henry David Thoreau and more came here to live and work.
In 1941, influential literary critic F. O. Matthiessen called the mid-1800s the American Renaissance because seven books “of the most enduring American literature” were written. They were:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1850, “The Representative Man”;
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850 & 1851, “The Scarlet Letter,” “The House of the Seven Gables”;
- Herman Melville, 1852, “Moby-Dick” and “Pierre”;
- Henry David Thoreau, 1854, “Walden or Life in the Woods”; and
- Walt Whitman, 1855, “Leaves of Grass.”
In this golden half-decade, four of the five authors — Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville — spent time in the Berkshires, and three of the seven books — “The House of the Seven Gables,” “Moby Dick” and “Pierre” — were written in the Berkshires, as were “The Wonder Book for Boys and Girls” and the outline for “The Blithedale Romance.”
With respect to the Berkshires in word and picture, there were even more pictures. Commonly called the Hudson River painters, they just as often painted the Housatonic. Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Asher Durand and George Inness set up their easels in the Berkshires.
The distinguished population of artists and writers seen against the backdrop of great natural beauty caused the Berkshires to become known as the American Lake District. The question is: Why did so many influential 19th-century artists and writers find their way here? It was a confluence of ideas straddling nationalism, art, economics and religion.
Nationalism
The years before the Civil War constituted a time of optimism, spirit, reform, nationalism and progress. National fervor influenced all areas of American society: economics, government, religion, medicine and the arts.
Art
American artists and writers sought to free themselves from the “tyrannical” belief that all great art and literature was European. They wanted to create a uniquely American aesthetic. In this bloodless war of independence, they found inspiration for an American school of art and an American literary voice in nature. As Asher B. Durand wrote, “The natural landscape is fraught with high and holy meaning.”
Economics
Industrialization and rapid urbanization created a new respect for the old agrarian ways. Epidemics swept crowded and unsanitary cities, killing thousands and creating the desire to flee. The combination created a “flight to safety” to the country.
Religion
According to historian John Blum, “By the start of the nineteenth century many of the Puritan dogmas – predestination, infant damnation and the total depravity of man – had been rejected and replaced by a God of Love.” This new God of love was to be found in nature; God was, literally, in the landscape.
American artists and writers, pastors and thinkers sought that mythical landscape located between the contending forces of city and wilderness, that pastoral sanctuary: Arcadia. Arcadia represented an aesthetic, political and religious ideal. By mid century, the industrialization that made pastoral life seem idyllic also produced the means to seek it out.
Here Longfellow found “The Old Clock on the Stairs”; Hawthorne named the view from his window the Shadow Brook and the Tanglewood; Melville saw his great white whale in the hump of a Berkshire hill; Bryant was inspired by Monument Mountain and Holmes by Rattlesnake Mountain. The artists painted what the writers captured in words. Berkshire locations inspired them, and in turn, they immortalized the Berkshires.
While the pilgrims traveled from Plymouth to Springfield in a few short years, it took them almost a century to find Berkshire. We love our Berkshires, but we must admit, in any direction, it is next door to nothing, and in a time of horseback and stagecoach travel, it was an easy distance from nowhere. The Berkshires was and is 50 miles from any port, and 135 miles from New York or Boston. It was, therefore, amazing the number of America’s best and brightest that came to this rural, out-of-the-way place. How did they get here?
Simple practicality. By mid century, the industrialization that caused them to flee created the means to go. The train brought them. When the railroad came to the Berkshires, connecting it to the outside world, it brought with it the literati from the cultural centers of New York and Boston. Halfway between those major cities, the Berkshires was sufficiently removed to offer a return to the Jeffersonian ideal and yet close enough to bring together the society of both cities.
We welcomed them and made them comfortable; they made us famous.
