Readers of The Berkshire Edge will be familiar with Gary Leveille and his biweekly series “Then & Now,” with historic local photos placed alongside their current-day counterparts. Leveille includes explanatory captions and, sometimes, longer descriptions. A recent installment in this series was an in-depth overview of the original North Egremont Baptist Church. Growing up in that town in the 1970s and ’80s, I always knew the building as the very big house near French Park that reminded me of a college dorm.
I chose Gary as one of my first profiles in my “Where We Are” series because I know I am not alone in finding “Then & Now” delightful, and I wanted to learn more about the man behind it. He is a board member and (very busy) volunteer collections manager at the Great Barrington Historical Society, but as it turns out, Gary’s devotion to southern Berkshire County history does not stem from a generational family connection. He grew up elsewhere and fell in love with the region via North Egremont, thanks to his summers camping at Prospect Lake Campground.
My conversation with Gary has been edited for length and clarity.
SHEELA CLARY
How do I pronounce your last name, first of all?
GARY LEVEILLE
La-vee-ay, which is sort of a slightly anglicized version of the old French Canadian. When I was in Montreal, it was a common name up there.
CLARY
Where did you grow up?
LEVEILLE
Because I’m a local historian, everyone assumes I was born and raised here. But I didn’t set foot here ’till 1964, when I was 12. I’m a southern Connecticut boy. I grew up near Waterbury in Cheshire, Conn. We came up camping at Prospect Lake [in North Egremont] when I was a kid, and fell in love with the place. You’d stay the whole season at Prospect when I was younger. Then as I got to high school, I was lucky enough to always get summer jobs that were Monday through Friday, so we were still able to come up for the weekends. When my parents stopped camping at Prospect Lake, I continued going.
CLARY
Do you want to paint a picture of the campground back then?
LEVEILLE
I think the tradition continued into the ’70s where picnickers and people from Columbia County would come to Prospect Lake for the day for picnics and to use the water slide. It was the only water slide around. I’ve asked over the years. There’s Taconic Lake over there, and Rudd Pond, so how come everybody from Columbia County went to Prospect Lake?
It was the water slide, the snack bar, the Rec Hall that had a jukebox and pinball machines. I learned to water ski there. It was just great. But change is going to happen. Now it’s a nice resort, and the town’s got a dam that’s fixed.
CLARY
So you came up through the campground and decided to settle here?
LEVEILLE
No, I went back and forth. I went to college at Western Connecticut State University and majored in earth science, with a second major in English and history. I graduated in 1975 and then taught science. But writing and creative stuff is more my thing. My main career was with Milton Bradley Hasbro, spanning 20 years. I was an editor and did a lot of creative work. I worked on some of the versions of Trivial Pursuit and on the writing part of hundreds of other games. I edited the rules.
CLARY
How about games like Stratego, Life, Clue?
LEVEILLE
I created new characters for Clue back in the ’90s… I haven’t checked to see if they’re still in there. So many games, like the Smurf game, the Daytona 500 game. I worked on the 25th anniversary of Hungry, Hungry Hippos, the Ouija board.
My favorite was the ‘Antiques Roadshow’ game, with a picture of an item that had been on the show and you had four choices to guess what the antique was. I thought, ‘I’m gonna sneak some Berkshire stuff into these questions.’ So there’s references to Van Deusenville and Melville and different things.
I dabble in antiques and collect old photos and postcards, maybe that’s why I was assigned the project. We got to go to a filming of the show in Boston, which was fascinating. When you watch ‘Antiques Roadshow’ on TV, you have no idea the thousands of people that are there waiting in lines.
By then we’d moved to Great Barrington. At one point we lived on the third floor over what’s now TP Saddleblanket. It was a clothing store… the Anne Louise shop, that’s what it was called! You’d look out the window onto Railroad Street and it was a very different place, with Graham’s Bar, and Kick’s Bar… this was in 1976 and ’77. It wasn’t trendy boutiques, let me put it that way. There was an auto supply place at the top of the street. The older generation would say, ‘Our parents wouldn’t let us go to Railroad Street!’ It had a reputation for gambling, drinking, other stuff.
We bought the house on Brook Lane [in Great Barrington] in 1989. It was worth the long commute to Springfield to be able to live in the southern Berkshires. We had to sell it a few years ago, as we had to find one-level living. We ended up in Lee. We’re still looking to come back down to Sheffield or Barrington, but, of course, prices have so skyrocketed now, it’s discouraging.
CLARY
At what point did you turn your attention to local history?
LEVEILLE
I used to visit with [former owner of the Old Egremont General Store] Joe Elliot, Craig Elliott’s dad, and talk history. He was very interested in the Knox Trail. Joe grew up in North Hillsdale. He was the one that figured out that the way they had the markers from Kinderhook to Egremont was wrong. I’ve been trying to find the paperwork he submitted that convinced somebody from Massachusetts to convince New York to fix their markers, which I think was remarkable.
The issue was between Kinderhook and Egremont. The old markers had it coming down to Claverack, because that whole district was called Claverack. Route 23 through Hillsdale didn’t exist and North Hillsdale was called Nobletown. That’s where the little village was. Until the early 1800s there was no main road going from Hudson through to Egremont.
[Joe Elliott] visited with some real old people who said their grandparents had a lot of oral history, and he managed to find old maps and figure out where he thought the Knox Trail went. He drew maps and presented them to the State of New York. They moved the marker to Green River, N.Y., and the Alford town line on 71. There’s still a few people in Kinderhook and Claverack that aren’t happy.
CLARY
What’s your favorite lecture to give?
LEVEILLE
Whatever I’m working on at the time. My column I call ‘bite-sized history.’ People have suggested, ‘Why don’t you write more details?’ Sometimes I do, like with the Indian Crossroads marker by old Searles High School. I went into great detail about that because that has a lot of social and political issues even today. But usually I like to keep it short and sweet with the pictures telling the story, because a lot of people find history boring. I don’t understand why!
I’ve also given lots of talks on trolleys. They started in the early 1900s from Pittsfield down to Great Barrington. In its heyday, the Berkshire Street Railway was the largest trolley system in the United States. After a few years, Los Angeles or San Francisco, one of them, surpassed it. It went from Canaan, Conn., all the way up to Bennington, Vt., and over to Hoosick Falls, N.Y. It wasn’t just the proliferation of automobiles that killed it, it was all powered by direct and alternating current generated by coal furnaces in Pittsfield. There were coal shortages, heavy winters where they couldn’t get the tracks cleared, labor strikes.
The last car into Great Barrington was in 1930. The Berkshire Street Railway became a bus company.
CLARY
What piece of history have you been the most fascinated by?
LEVEILLE
One of my favorite topics is Laura Ingersoll Secord, who was born in Great Barrington. She was a heroine in the War of 1812 in Canada. Laura Ingersoll’s father was a patriot during the Revolutionary War and was promoted to major during Shays’ Rebellion. He fell into some economic hard times, and Canada was promising all this farmland for next to nothing, and a lot of people from Great Barrington moved up there to take possession of that land.
Laura Secord went up to Queenstown, near Niagara Falls, Canada. In the war, long story short, American soldiers came to her house. She’s trying to take care of her injured husband, and she hears them talking about launching an attack on Major Fitzgibbons. She finds someone to watch her husband and hikes 19 miles through the wilderness to warn this major of this impending attack. Hundreds if not thousands of lives were saved because of her warning.
There are statues of her all over Canada, and schools named after her. She was born where Mason Library is now, and there’s a plaque there.
CLARY
How extensive are the collections at the Great Barrington Historical Society?
LEVEILLE
Our collection fills the entire second floor of Ramsdell library, and half the second floor of the Wheeler House is archives. The floor can’t support much more weight there. There’s been some preliminary talk about building another building near our barns that match the look of the barn. But the Historical Society has a mortgage—unlike most other historical societies—and financial challenges with monthly operating costs that are not covered by grants.
CLARY
Lastly, if there were one area of historical information you’d like more for local people to be more aware of, what would it be?
LEVEILLE
Some of us local historians joke that everything that has ever happened in the world, when we investigate it, ends up somehow being connected to the Berkshires. It’s like that game, 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The last president of the Republic of Texas, before it was annexed to the U.S., was born and raised in Great Barrington. Anson Jones was his name. We really are connected to the world in so many ways.
