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 twenty-first century.
I cannot deny it: academics, historians, and researchers have a different definition of fun. Different strokes for…you know the rest.
Can you imagine spending 6 weeks searching records to determine if eight words in a 133-year-old paragraph are correct or incorrect? Gaining pleasure from proving which complete sentence or subordinate clause is accurate? Transliterating eighteenth century handwriting wherein, for no known reason, every s looks like an f; every h looks like a k and the word “such” is problematic?
I remember, after a three-state search, finding the complete inventory of all furnishings in Ventfort Hall at the time of George Morgan’s death misfiled in New Jersey. I remember being unable to keep from whooping out-loud in the hushed library.
So it should come as no surprise that one of my ideas of fun is to walk Berkshire and imagine it as it was hundreds of years ago – diverting, entertaining, informative – here, I will try to prove it to you. Pick a spot – Tanglewood?
It is almost time for Tanglewood 2015. Under a black sky, 10,000 people will spread across the great lawn behind the 5,000 in the Shed. The dark broken only by occasional candle flickers or a flashlight flicking on/off as someone picks his way through people, blankets, camp chairs, and picnic tables searching acres for his six feet of personal space. Not a leaf stirs in the warm humid air. The conductor taps and you hear Fanfare for the Common Man (Copeland 1942).
Same spot: the Grounds of Tanglewood 1846. The sky is black and not a leaf stirs. There are six people on the grounds: Samuel G. and Anna Hazard Barker Ward, their two children Anna and Thomas, and a skeleton household staff.
“Harriet and Mary (cook and chambermaid) left me with only Martha the nurse and an Irish girl, just over, from Stockbridge,” Anna writes in her journal.
Only candlelight in the windows of Highwood relieves the surrounding darkness. All at once light splits the sky and the thunder of a Berkshire storm rolls across the lake and slams into the yard at Highwood.
China falls from the plate rack, the laundry is whipped off the line and deposited in the Berkshire mud, and the pigs get loose.
Anna shaken but firm writes, “I shall be mistress of myself though all the china fall and the bedding and freshly bleached linen must be put back in the wash.”
Within days Hawthorne will arrive. He will settle in the Red House across the road. Like Anna Ward, he, too, will write about what he sees out of his window. In so doing, he will name our places: the Shadow Brook, the Tangle Wood and Bald Mountain.
Some writers place Tanglewood in Stockbridge (correctly). Others place it in Lenox (incorrectly). Some place it “between Lenox and Stockbridge,” as if it were a separate state or a state of mind. These last writers may have struck upon the greater truth. It was always a place of congregation and always those who congregated created.
Before the first white men settled in Berkshire County, the 500 acres in the northeast corner of Stockbridge that would one day be the Tanglewood Music Festival, were common ground — land set aside by the Housatunnuck for the benefit of the whole tribe.
In 1736, the General Court of Boston authorized a mission to “civilize and Christianize” the Indians in the village of Stockbridge. Soon the land was the private property of the Williams family. The white settlers brought with them a strident belief in private property. It would be almost two hundred years before an act of generosity returned the ground for mass gathering.
In 1937, on a summer night, owner Mrs. Brooks and a close friend Nancy Keefe walked in the Tanglewood gardens by moonlight; just two women alone on the grounds.
In an article (“Tanglewood’s Tappans”, Berkshire Eagle, August 6, 1966) Keefe writes she recalls suggesting that Brooks give the land to a nunnery.
An odd suggestion to make to the granddaughter of Caroline Sturgis Tappan who pointedly sat in her window on Sunday doing needlework – working on the Sabbath – in full view of her more religiously conservative neighbors as they walked to church.
The idea of a nunnery was rejected but the idea of a gift caught and held. Mrs. Brooks said, “This place should be for thousands.”
Brooks and her sister Miss Tappan gave Tanglewood, 210 of the original 500 acres, to the Boston Symphony Orchestra ensuring a permanent home for the summer music festival. In 1979, the 170-acre Seranak property, former home of Serge Koussevitzky, was added to the 210 acre Tanglewood estate, and in 1987, BSO purchased the 120-acre Highwood estate. The 500 acres of Indian common ground was once again intact. The land was never returned to the Indians but the Indian purpose was returned to the land: common ground for the common good –a fanfare for the common man.
