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.
The Berkshires are bustling. The population is swelling as we get noticed for being the best place to celebrate Christmas, the most livable community, and top of the list to visit. All this, and not for the first time.
Two hundred years ago, South County was bursting at its seams. The inhabitants became merchants and manufacturers. In Great Barrington, Dr. William Whiting branched out, and in his dooryard (front yard) erected an earthenware manufactory. Moses Hopkins (kin of the minister) had a potash (fertilizer) manufactory in his dooryard. Main Street Great Barrington was indeed mixed use — both residential business and industry.
There were still old-growth forests between settlements, and farmers were the original and continual inhabitants of the Berkshires. However, there were profitable outgrowths of farming. For example, farmers became wool and flax manufacturers; sheering wool, carding and spinning it into yarn. (Carding is the soul of spinning. Carding, otherwise called pulling and combing, pulls the fibers, combs them of unwanted elements, and straightens them so the fibers can be spun into yarn.) It is said that the first “carding” machine was brought here and set up at Booth and Gibbs, merchants, on Main Street in Great Barrington. “Home spun,” the cloth made from the flax plant and finished at home by the farmers’ wives, was sold “down street” (downtown) in shops. Everyone of every class wore home spun. Soon, there were mills for the cloth.
There were Berkshire mills for everything. They say there were 14 in Great Barrington alone, and even tiny Stockbridge had nine. Two hundred years ago, the finished products needed — textile, wood, paper, grist (ground grain), and glass — were milled next door to the houses and farms.
Other trades went door to door. For example, the tinkers carried their metals and molds for spoons and buttons. They were also menders of pewter pitchers and household implements. The shoemaker worked where he could, even his front room, and went door to door selling his wares. Shoemakers were often tanners, as well. Tanning was the process of dehairing and degreasing hides and pounding them into leather. Once tanneries were established, there was sufficient product to sell to merchants for resale in their stores on the county’s main streets.
The hatters worked at home and often placed their newly finished headpieces on the pickets of their fences along main streets to dry. Some, for example Timothy Arnold, had a shop. Arnold’s shop on Castle Street was a meeting place for the men of Great Barrington. In addition to hats, Arnold’s was good for a flagon and a laugh.
Hats drying on picket fences were also advertisement of the goods available. “Commercials” for merchants were modest in those days, but business-like: “a handsome little assortment of dry goods;” “a moderate assortment of medicines;” “highest prices paid for potash;” and “ready cash only.” The merchants were either dry goods, edibles, or drugs and medicines — that is, department stores, groceries or pharmacies.
Blacksmiths, nail makers, and wagonwrights were interspersed with churches, taverns, stagecoach inns, magistrates, merchants, and even the large houses of notables. Many merchants lived above their stores or had large rooms above rented for meetings or dances. It was higgledy-piggledy, boisterous, and colorful.
Before a post office was established, the hub for letters and newspapers was the stagecoach inn. The coaches carried the papers and letters., which were left “on the mantel” for collection by recipients. Alternatively, in Massachusetts, there were post road and post riders. For a fee, post riders would deliver directly to the recipient if something were urgent or time sensitive. The first post office in the county was established in Stockbridge in 1792. It hardly compares to the business done at the Stockbridge post office today. An old ledger shows $11.21 collected for the quarter (three months). Still, until recently, the American postal service was the pride of this country and superior to any other.
Stagecoaches and stagecoach inns crisscrossed the county. The train had a depot in the Berkshires as early as the 1830s. As small and out of the way our county is, and always has been, we have always been a hub of travel. Situated at the nexus of Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts, the shortest route from one large 18th and early 19th century city to another — New York, Boston, and Albany — was through the Berkshires. We are now and have always been the innkeepers to the outlanders.
Noticed, not for the first time, as “the best of” this and that — small town, Christmas town, safest and most livable town — the trick now is the same as it always was. How do we stay small and unique, yet also welcoming?
