It may be difficult for us to understand Berkshire County 280 years ago. Instead of texts, Tweets, and telephone, they had the Post Office Tree. There were no restaurants or grocery stores as we understand them. They not only had to make what they ate, they had to grow the ingredients. A New England village had more taverns than churches. In 1781, the ratio in Stockbridge was 10 to one. In the 18th century, there was no concept of zoning; there was only the convenience of mixed use. Church, tavern, blacksmith, private house, public livery, and stable stood cheek by jowl. There were post offices but no postage stamps.
In Stockbridge, the Post Office Tree stood on Plain Street (Main Street today) in front of the post office (about where Minkler Insurance Office is today). On the tree, folks posted official announcements such as when and where town meetings would be. They also posted who was wanted and who was warned out—anted and warned out by the law. Misdeeds were closer to what we call immoral today than what we call illegal. For example, a person could be wanted for fornication and not attending church services.
Warned out meant permanently ejected from Stockbridge for lack of a visible means of support. There was no social safety net. In fairness, the populations of early New England villages had so little that most “purchases” were barter. Few had actual money; fewer had discretionary income. They say that was the reason there was little prostitution—no hard cash.
One man posted a notice that he would no longer be held responsible for his wife’s debts because she was spendthrift. Wives had no other means of support, no right to hold a job or own property. If he would not pay her bills, she could not incur any.
The Elders of the Church posted an admonition that no disrespect for teachers would be tolerated within the hearing of the children. A far cry from a school board meeting today.
About that 10 to one ratio of taverns to one church, in fairness, the tavern was more than a place to drink. Once a week, the stagecoach brought news and newspapers from beyond the hills and delivered it to the tavern. It was a place to read the news and leave the paper for the next person. Unlike the blizzard of “breaking news” pelting us now, the news was a week old, and the next installment were a week hence.
Well, at least since there were no cars, there were no parking problems. Not quite. No matter how different things were, two things in Stockbridge never changed: There was always a big white house on the corner of Main and South and there were always parking problems.
The big white house was a private home and tailor shop until 1775. That year it was purchased and converted into just what it is today: an inn and tavern. The parking problems are harder to explain.
In 1775, there were 1,000 people in Stockbridge compared to Pittsfield with 138 families. Stockbridge could actually be called bustling. Seven years later, Stockbridge citizens wanted a “decent and honorable house of worship”—a second Congregational Church. The estimated cost for a new church was 1,000 pounds sterling. At a town meeting, citizens were told they could pay their share in money, grain, or cattle. The motion to build a new meetinghouse passed.
The meetinghouse was finished in 1784. It was topped with a steeple and weathervane in the shape of a fish. Today there is a plaque, at the intersection of Old Meeting House and North Church Streets, but for reasons unknown, the plaque does not mark the spot where the church stood, but instead reads, “opposite this spot stood the second meetinghouse of the Stockbridge Congregational Church from 1784 – 1824.”
When the church was dedicated by the Reverend Dr. Stephen West, lines of carriages came over the hills and through the meadows. Unfortunately, the location of the church was not ideal. Carriages tipped over on the steep inclines and were stuck in the muddy meadows. The Reverend West contributed part of the orchard beside his house to create a roadbed that cut diagonally up the hill and across the meadow making it less precipitous.
Now carriages and horses could reach the church in safety, but when they did, there was no place to hitch horses or shelter them. A horse block was built outside the church for hitching, and a shed was constructed for the horses in inclement weather.
In the end, some argued, the horse barn was better than the meetinghouse. There was no stove in the church and no rugs on the church floor. On the outside, the meetinghouse was painted white, but only on the outside, the interior walls were rough and unadorned. Still the town pronounced its work done: The Second Congregational Church of Stockbridge was fully approachable and fully functional—ready for Reverend West’s two-hour sermons. All problems addressed, or were they?
The Second Congregational Church was built next door to the home of Asa Bement. When Bement first arrived in Stockbridge in 1758, he lived in the home on Plain Street vacated by the Reverend Jonathan Edwards when he left the Congregational Church of Stockbridge to assume the position of President of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). In 1764, Bement purchased 16 acres with a dwelling house and a blacksmith’s shop from John Chamberlain. Being next door to the meetinghouse was much less peaceful. Very soon, it was necessary as well as convenient for congregants to hitch their horses to Bement’s fence.
These were good, God-fearing neighbors in their Sunday best using Bement’s yard as a stable-yard and his fence as a hitching post. Bement stood it as long as he could, but finally in 1786, he affixed a sign to his fence that read, “No hitching.” Thus Asa Bement became the author of the first “no parking” sign in Berkshire County.
