When “The Cottagers” came to our rural area in the nineteenth century, they changed the landscape and the economy.
Mrs. Brooke Astor defined a Berkshire Cottage as “a second home never a primary residence of no fewer than 20 rooms on no less than 30 acres.” Even that definition falls short.
In reality, the Cottagers each bought a number of farms and combined them, amounting to hundreds of acres of undeveloped land, even a whole village or a school district. They each created a single estate with a single Berkshire Cottage, formal gardens, the necessary outbuildings, walking paths, and riding trails. Each Berkshire Cottage was situated on as many as 500 or 700 acres.
The price of farmland went from $5 an acre to $500 an acre. The farmers sold. Young families could not afford to buy. What was once a simple and rather poor agricultural community became a Gilded Age Resort.
Ironically, or perhaps predictably, the Gilded Age elite sought to escape the world that they made. Industrialization and rapid urbanization made them rich. It also created crowded cities, an influx of immigrants, a grave disparity of wealth, illness, and crime. The very things the late nineteenth century elite wished to escape also produced the means to do so: the money and the locomotive.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should. That all happened from the 1880s through the first years of the twentieth century. In the years leading up to and including the turn of the twenty-first Century, it all happened again. One nice thing about history repeating itself is that we can learn what happens next.
After depressions, two world wars, and a governmental boost to the middle class, we settled into a period of wider-spread economic prosperity. In town, there was population growth, and the middle class was in the majority. Those in the middle had one house, one working parent, one car, and 2.5 children. They were satisfied with holidays spent at a hotel.
Rural areas experienced a decrease in population, depressed land prices, and in Stockbridge, a preoccupation with what to do with those great, big, abandoned houses. Yup, the Gilded Age elite left. They moved on or died and their children had little interest in the old. The world kept spinning and change was the only certainty.
With population growth, hyperbolic politics, and a swing toward oligarchy, we began to flatten the Bell Curve. It was easy—static wages and ever rising taxes. The rich got richer and the disparity in wealth increased until (and here the statistics vary) 50 percent of the population controlled 98 percent of the country’s wealth, or 10 percent controlled 70 percent, or 1 percent controlled 30 percent.
Enter COVID. Those who could afford to escape the urban areas did. The need for second houses was once more manifest, and they came here.
The result of this modern migration is the same as it was when the Cottagers moved in: increased real estate prices, decreased opportunity for young families to buy, and voile! A twenty-first century resort is born.
The fevered efforts to artificially create affordable housing; the governmental stab at regulating growth in a resort; the debate between folks who think we can bring back the middle class and the ones who think that ship has sailed; the lack of focus on what actually needs protection—all of that is new.
It takes thirty years to grow a shade tree, a hundred years to grow an old growth forest. No one knows how long it takes to tear up blacktop and successfully replant if you “pave paradise and put up a parking lot” because no one has successfully done it. No one knows how to reclaim land or protect the waterway if a 1000 square foot two-season house is replaced with a 5000 square foot four-season house on a lake. No one knows the time and circumstances necessary to get the people and the community back if we can no longer pass down a house from one generation to the next because we haven’t actually done that either.
One thing different between then and now: they came and built but also protected the land.
