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.
Since shortly after the last passenger train left the station, people have been asking when will the train return to South Berkshire? The train left in stages between 1963 (the New Haven Line) and 1968 (the Penn Central RR). There was a brief reprieve between 1969 and 1971 when the Penn Central returned, but on April 30, 1971, it terminated all passenger service for good.
Admittedly, 51 years later in 2022, passenger train service (Amtrak) returned. It is limited train service—weekends only, in summer months only, New York’s Penn Station to Pittsfield, via Albany-Rensselaer only. It has a nice name: the Berkshire Flyer. Will the Flyer—a train-a-day for weekend tourists—have a future? Will gas prices create a demand for tourists to hop the train rather than hop in the car?
More often, change is the result of a confluence of events rather than of a single event, and the world is changing in more ways than one. In addition to the roadway into the Berkshires, there is the Internet highway. If people choose to move here, and work from home via the Internet, train travel might not figure into the equation. Or is Representative Smitty Pignatelli correct? Is the future of train travel more a west to east line than a south to north line? That would be a commuter line—at least twice daily on weekdays, not weekends, as it rolled through Springfield, Worchester, Boston, and beyond, dropping Berkshire residents off at workplaces and creating a bedroom community.
What supported the trains the first time around? The train arrived—steam engine screeching—in 1826. The first train pulled into Berkshire County in 1838 in West Stockbridge. Train travel into and out of Berkshire County was sustained for 133 years. A neighbor with a long memory said, “I remember when the trains came into the Berkshires and there were fewer cars clogging the streets.” What sustained it? First comes the desire to go there, and then comes the way to get there.
We love our Berkshires, but we must admit, in any direction, Berkshire County is next door to nowhere. In the time of horseback and stagecoach travel, it was an easy distance from nothing. It was—and is—50 miles from any port and 135 miles from New York or Boston. It was, therefore, amazing that so many came here at all. The secret is that Berkshire County was at the nexus of all those New England roads. All those roads came through this rural, out-of-the-way place. It was slow-going, by stagecoach, is was 15 1/2 hours from Connecticut to Albany. They needed a place to stop, and they stopped here.
By the mid-1840s, Berkshire County—and particularly South Berkshire—was dubbed “the American Lake District.” Both Henry Ward Beecher and Herman Melville are credited, but it is less important which 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 English Lake District, 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. The writers and painters caused the first wave of fame, and South County became and remained a vacation destination.
By July 1843, an advertisement in the Pittsfield Sun jubilantly exclaimed that the train, traveling an average of 25 miles per hour, made that 15 1/2 hour stagecoach trip from Albany in less than two hours. The advertisement burbled on: “The (train) cars for passengers … were large, roomy, and well-ventilated, about 50 feet in length, fitted up with separate stuffed mahogany chairs … for the 80 passengers.” The reporter extols the view from the window, and “the stillness and un-jarring steadiness” of the ride.
All this was compared to the wheels of the stagecoach bumping over root and rock outcroppings on narrow roads. As train travel was faster, travelers could go further. As it was more comfortable, the journey was viewed as part of the vacation. Just as in Pittsfield today, passenger train service was a train-a-day on weekends—clearly a service for tourists, but the county was always more than a tourist destination.
The Berkshires was also a manufacturing hub. The county grew things, mined things, and made things. Just as the airplane would shrink the planet, the train moved Berkshire County hours closer to ports and major population centers.
It would be hard to think of many things that affected the economic development of Berkshire County more than the arrival of the train. Moving goods in and out of the county boosted the local economy. Moving people within the county made it possible to fill jobs wherever the county economy was growing. Tourists from New York and Boston considered The Berkshires an easy destination. Artists and writers who traveled into the Berkshires by train established it as the “western outpost of the American Renaissance.” The fame they brought to The Berkshires through their words and pictures attracted the Berkshire Cottagers—the uber-rich permanent summer residents. And the rest, as they say, is history—our history.
If the speed of train travel shaped us, what will happen next? How will the speed of the Internet change us? How will it shape the next stage of Berkshire history? Will we become a bedroom community, or rural residential for electronic workplace or something as yet unimagined? Is there a way to pick the consequences before we pick the action?
