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THE
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
MASSACHUSETTS
1916-1955
Gc 974.402 P67w 1560661
M. L.
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
/
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
10 DO 3 1833 01115 1278
THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD MASSACHUSETTS
1916-1955
THE HISTORY
OF e
PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
1916-1955
by
George F. Willison
PITTSFIELD
* TOWN 1761 * MAS
=
+ CITY 1891
3
NIGNO
NUMING
+ MASSACHUSETTS S
PUBLISHED BY THE CITY OF PITTSFIELD
1957
COPYRIGHT BY CITY OF PITTSFIELD MASSACHUSETTS 1957
SUN PRINTING CORPORATION PITTSFIELD - MASSACHUSETTS
1560661
This volume was prepared under the supervision of the City of Pittsfield History Commission:
DAVID R. DALZELL JOHN E. JOYCE, JR. LAWRENCE K. MILLER ROBERT G. NEWMAN, Chairman JAMES J. SCULLARY, Clerk
FOREWORD
Proud of its origins, its growth, and its accomplishments, Pittsfield has long been historically minded. That this is the fourth in a series of volumes officially commissioned by the authorities to record the community's history from the beginning is in itself a remarkable fact.
My warm thanks go to the many in Pittsfield who so generously and graciously aided me in compiling material for this book. I extend special thanks to the Berkshire Athenaeum for the workshop and the splendid facilities it placed at my disposal.
Pittsfield's story since 1916 is a fascinating one. It sharply points up what we are apt to forget - how modern "modern" is, and yet how basic human problems never change. They just get new projections, as developments in Pittsfield make clear in vivid and significant detail, adding an interesting chapter to the American story.
I hope Pittsfieldians and others will find as much pleasure and instruction in reading these pages as I found in putting them together.
To any who may think that matters of importance have been omitted or not sufficiently stressed, I say only this- that, as an historian with no axes to grind, I approached developments, incidents, and personalities objectively, and gave them such weight and space as seemed good to me.
GEORGE F. WILLISON
South Hill Ballston Spa, New York July 30, 1957
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In gathering material for this book, which carries to 1956 the history of Pittsfield begun in Joseph E. A. Smith's two volumes (1734-1800, 1800-1876) and continued to 1916 by Edward Boltwood, the City History Commission has received welcome assistance from many sources. Thanks are due to the city and county departments, the churches, com- munity organizations and business firms which have gen- erously answered requests for information. In addition, the following readers of the manuscript have made valuable suggestions which are gratefully acknowledged: Mrs. David J. Chesneau, Miss Fanny G. Clark, Colonel William H. Eaton, Mayor Harvey E. Lake, George A. Newman, James M. Rosenthal and Miss Ruth N. Wittan. Special apprecia- tion is expressed to City Clerk John J. Fitzgerald and his staff for the lists of officers appearing in the appendix, to Public Works Commissioner John F. Daniels and members of his department for the Pittsfield map, and to Mrs. Leonora Goerlach, Berkshire Eagle librarian, for aid in assembling the photographs.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowled gments List of Illustrations
I Pittsfield, 1955: A Summary View 1
II Pittsfield's First Half Century: 1761 - 1811 14
III From the War of 1812 to the Civil War 37
IV Pittsfield: 1861 - 1915 56
V World War I Years 87
VI Pittsfield in the Twenties 123
VII Pittsfield in the Great Depression First Phase: 1930 - 1933 152
VIII Pittsfield in the Great Depression Second Phase: 1934 - 1939 172
IX Pittsfield and World War II: 1940 - 1945 192
X Post-War Years: 1946 - 1949 213
XI Pittsfield: 1950 - 1955 228
XII Government
244
XIII Schools 277
XIV Health and Welfare
312
XV Churches 342
XVI Literature and the Arts
375
XVII Business and Industry
397
XVIII Morningside Becomes Electric
436
XIX Clubs and Organizations
458
Appendix
502
Index
508
Map, Pittsfield in 1955
Inside back cover
Illustrations
Present-day Pittsfield from the air
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 1708 - 1778, for whom Pittsfield is named
Park Square in 1830
The "Wide-Awakes" stage a Lincoln rally on North Street, 1860
The Academy of Music, 1873 World War I-Company F leaves for camp, 1917 The Depression-PW A clears ground for the new municipal building, winter of 1938
Trolley tracks at Park Square-Laying them down (1901) and picking them up (1942)
World War II-A tired band plays on after the vic- tory parade, 1945
School's out at North Junior High
The round barn of the Shaker Family in Hancock, just across the Pittsfield line
Temple of Chamber Music, South Mountain
On the ski slopes at Bousquet's
Sailboat race, Pontoosuc Lake
One of the areas for testing and finishing large power transformers at GE's Morningside plant
North Street, Saturday afternoon
I
Pittsfield, 1955 A Summary View
SETTLED AS A LONELY MOUNTAIN TOWN more than two hun- dred years ago, long the metropolis of western Massachu- setts and still growing, Pittsfield lies in the heart of the Berk- shires, with the splendor of the "Purple Hills" around it. A few miles to the north looms the forested mass of Greylock, not high as mountains go, but still the highest in Massachusetts, rising to almost 3,500 feet.
More than a thousand feet above the sea, the city stands on a broad plain in the upper valley of the Housatonic River- named from the Indian Hous-aton-uck, or Place Beyond the Mountains, and it was well named, whether approached from east or west. Gathering its headwaters here in Pittsfield, the river flows southward to empty into Long Island Sound, roughly paralleling the course of the Connecticut River about forty miles to the east and that of the Hudson the same distance to the west, divided from each by a long range of hills.
Though negligible in its influence today, the river has played an important role in the life of the community, especially in its early days, for its once sparkling waters, now unfortunately polluted, furnished the power that turned the wheels of the town's first mills-grist mills, "up-and-down" sawmills, and textile mills-the foundation of the city's later industrial growth.
It is indeed a lovely land, this high Berkshire country of gently rolling wooded hills and open sunny valleys, and Pitts- field is its center geographically and in so many other respects. Since 1868, it has been the county seat or "shire town" of Berkshire, the relatively large county that stretches some forty
1
PITTSFIELD, 1955 - A SUMMARY VIEW
miles across the western end of Massachusetts, touching Ver- mont on the north, New York on the west, and Connecticut on the south.
Alert and energetic, a community of more than 55,000 people -the 1955 state census gave it 55,294-Pittsfield is primarily an industrial center, and of far more importance than one might suspect at first glance. Its chief products-electrical equipment, special "money" paper, fine stationery, paper mill machin- ery, woolens, and silk specialties-have a national and inter- national market.
Whenever any of us switches on electric light or power, the chances are that somewhere along the line some Pittsfield equip- ment or invention helped to make the push-button "magic" possible. One "made in Pittsfield" article is universally sought and prized. United States "greenbacks" are made in Wash- ington, engraved there by the Treasury. But the special paper stock upon which the bills are engraved, from the lowly one- spot on up, comes from Pittsfield, as it has since 1879.
A rare combination, Pittsfield is at once an industrial town and a sports and recreation area, both a summer and winter playground, a mecca for vacationers and week-enders. It is the financial capital of the Berkshires. It is an insurance center. As a railroad junction and the hub of a network of main high- ways, it is the wholesale and retail trade center of a wide area. Its principal street, busy North Street, is Wall Street, is Main Street, is Fifth Avenue to people for miles around.
Pittsfield has made a name for itself in the arts and sciences. The annual chamber music festival on South Mountain, initiat- ed and sponsored by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, enjoys international fame, being known to musicians everywhere and to music-lovers from coast to coast. One of the great American novels, perhaps the greatest, a world classic, Moby-Dick, was written here in 1851 by Herman Melville at his Arrowhead farm.
The SKC system for transmitting alternating electric current, a basic technique now generally in use throughout the world, was perfected in Pittsfield. Here, in 1921, flashed the first man-
2
THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
made lightning bolt of 1,000,000 volts, an event of great scientific and popular interest reported in the press around the world. The local General Electric plant has pioneered many important developments in electrical theory and engineering.
In its older sections the city is still largely shaped by the pattern laid down by the early settlers. Founding their settle- ment as Pontoosuc Plantation in 1752, incorporating it as the town of Pittsfield nine years later, they built their first houses inside the arms of a rough "V" formed by the junction of the East and West branches of the Housatonic. Most of urban Pittsfield still lies within this "V", though recent growth has caused it to overflow and spread outward, especially toward the southeast and westward toward beautiful Lake Onota- romantically storied as the "Lake of the White Deer," though, to match the Indian legend that gave it its name, it should somewhat more descriptively be the "Lake of the White Doe."
Today, as almost from the beginning, the city centers on Park Square. The hub of community life, the scene of many stirring events and happy celebrations down the years, it is almost pocket handkerchief in size. But in the summer, with its lawn and tall trees, it is a welcome island of green in a grey sea of concrete; and in winter, at the Yuletide season, with its large community Christmas tree ablaze with colored lights, a beacon of hope and joy for all beholders. Here in the Park stood the grand Old Elm, a giant of the primeval forest, the pride of Pittsfield and a symbol of its soaring hopes for genera- tions, down to 1864, when the lightning-scarred old tree had to be felled.
Park Square has borne down the years a great variety of names-the Green, Wendell Square, Municipal Square, and City Hall Park, among others. Its present name is a misnomer. Park Square is not square. With its corners clipped to facilitate the flow of traffic, it has become an oval, around which whirs local and through traffic day and night-private cars, buses, pick-up trucks, dump trucks, and noisy smelly diesel-powered trailer trucks as big as boxcars-creating one of the city's serious traffic problems, of which it has many.
3
PITTSFIELD, 1955 - A SUMMARY VIEW
Around Park Square stand many important buildings-the County Courthouse, completed in 1871; the odd stone pile, bastard Gothic in style, of the Berkshire Athenaeum (the public library), dedicated in 1876; some smaller and older office buildings along what is still known as Bank Row, though the banks departed years ago; the city's largest hotel, currently known as the Wendell once again; the home office of the Berkshire Life Insurance Company; the large building of the Berkshire County Savings Bank; the grey-stone First Church of Christ (Congregational), with a big clock in the tower that has been ticking since 1822; the City Hall; the red-stone structure of St. Stephen's (Episcopal); and a nondescript two-storied business block on the site of Pittsfield's first parsonage.
The small City Hall, nestled between and quite overshad- owed by the two churches, is simple in line but otherwise not distinguished. A venerable structure, two stories high, its brick now covered with yellowish paint, it was built as the Town Hall in 1832 when Pittsfield's population was not a tenth of what it is today. Though more offices have been added by ex- tending the building toward the back, the City Hall has long been inadequate. The original structure has had to be shored up many times to keep it from collapse; the City Council dares not hold meetings in the Council Chamber upstairs for fear that the floor will give way and come tumbling down on the offices below.
Building a new City Hall is largely a question of taxes. It would involve a large capital outlay, a matter of serious con- cern to a city that always carefully watches its budget. Putting first things first, the community has chosen in recent years to devote its large capital outlays to building more and better schools. Even so, a new City Hall stands high on Pittsfield's agenda.
Out of Park Square run the city's four main streets-North, East, South, and West, as they were rather prosaically but quite appropriately named when they were laid out broad and straight as the original roads of the town. From the point of view of modern traffic, this was fortunate, for in many New England
4
THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
towns the older streets are narrow and as crooked as when they were meandering cow paths, horseback trails, or wagon roads.
For this, Pittsfield can thank its first highway surveyor, Cap- tain John Huston, who liked to run straight lines for roads, with plenty of space for passage. His wide roads were consid- ered a sheer waste in the early days, and those living along the highways plowed and planted right out to the edge of the dusty, single-lane wagon track, bumpy and full of ruts at all times, altogether unusable during winter snows, and a sea of mud for weeks every spring. As late as 1920, except for North Street, the city's main streets remained largely unpaved and in a "deplorable condition," as the mayor of the day ad- mitted-a condition that has been remedied since then.
North of Park Square lies the main business district, con- centrated largely along North Street. Here in the three-quarters of a mile from the Park to the Pittsfield General Hospital are the larger office buildings, the banks and other financial insti- tutions, the department stores, the movie theatres, the specialty shops, the jewelers, the "five and tens" that now sell almost anything and everything up to $30 or more in price, a super- market or two, the larger of the soda fountain-bazaars still known as "drug stores," and the usual variety of businesses along a typical Main street.
Up to twenty-five years ago, almost all of the stores along North Street were locally owned and operated. Some had been in the family for generations. Today, most of the larger estab- lishments belong to one or another of the chain-store systems, under the control of "foreign capital."
The elms that once lined North Street are gone. While rather plain, with nothing distinctively New England about it, it is a pleasant and well-kept street, reflecting an air of general pros- perity. It is notable for the absence of overhanging signs, which are forbidden by ordinance. As its buildings are all more or less of a height, with no skyscrapers obtruding, it presents a long low silhouette. It might be the main street of a Midwestern town except for the mountains in the background.
5
PITTSFIELD, 1955 - A SUMMARY VIEW
Pittsfield used to be known as a "Saturday town." On that day, with streets and stores crowded, an air of bustle, excite- ment, and gaiety prevailed as people from all the neighborhood came in their buggies or "Democrat" wagons and tied their horses at hitching posts along the main streets as they bought supplies for the next week. Improving their opportunity, the women caught up on the gossip, children enjoyed lollipops and a soda, while the men so inclined retired to the saloons to have a drink or two-or three or four-with old friends or new acquaintances.
Today, Pittsfield is a "Thursday night town." On that eve- ning, the downtown stores remain open till nine. Busy shoppers dart in and out of doors, laden with bundles. Friends meet and stop to chat in the street. The soda fountains, lunch rooms, and restaurants are filled with people, for this is a social occasion. While they may not have much money to spend, the evening seems to be especially popular with teen-agers and those a bit older. In small groups they wander up North Street and back down the other side, laughing and joking, shouting to friends, passing and repassing, eager to see and to be seen, particularly by those of the other sex. Though there is not so much of for- mal courtship about it, it is much like the paseo in a town of Old Spain.
West, South, and East streets have been less affected by the rising tides of commerce than North Street. But West Street, like North, has lost its trees and is commercial from the Park to the railroad station, near which stands the large plant of the Eaton Paper Corporation, known from coast to coast for its fine stationery and writing accessories.
South Street still has most of its tall magnificent elms and remains largely non-commercial, though for a few blocks it has become what is known as Automobile Row, or Gasoline Alley. Below these automobile agencies and filling stations it is residential, with many large and attractive houses set well back on broad lawns. East Street, as far as Elm, has scarcely been touched by commerce except for a few business buildings near the Park.
6
THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
To the northeast, well outside the central business district, along the tracks of the Boston & Albany Railroad, the im- portant New England link of the far-flung New York Central system, stretches the huge Pittsfield plant of the General Elec- tric Company, one of its larger manufacturing units. Its scores of buildings cover more than 250 acres, being chiefly devoted to making transformers, large and small, as well as high voltage equipment for the transmission and distribution of electricity. General Electric's Chemical and Metallurgical Department has headquarters in Pittsfield.
The electric transformer, it may fairly be said, built modern Pittsfield. The first of them turned out here was completed in 1891, built by the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company which had been founded the year before by the inventor of the transformer, William Stanley, a resident of neighboring Great Barrington. In 1886, Stanley had given Great Barrington the world's first commercial electric system using alternating cur- rent-a system now almost universally in use.
Finding his opportunities limited, Stanley shifted his activ- ities to Pittsfield in 1890, founding his company to make elec- trical apparatus. Original capitalization was small. It amount- ed to a mere $25,000, for Berkshire investors were skeptical about the future of anything as new-fangled as electrical machinery. Establishing a small shop on Clapp Avenue, with a working force of sixteen men, Stanley began making trans- formers.
With little competition in the field, the company's business increased phenomenally. By 1893, it had 300 men at work mak- ing not only transformers, but generators, switchboard appara- tus, rotary converters, and other devices.
Profits ran high-occasionally as high as 50 per cent, and never below 30 per cent. Capitalization was rapidly increased- to $50,000 in 1891, to $200,000 in 1893, to $300,000 in 1894, to $500,000 in 1896, to $2,000,000 in 1900. In that year the company began constructing, in the Morningside district, a huge factory such as Pittsfield had never seen-ninety feet wide and 500 feet long-which was soon employing 1,200 men.
7
PITTSFIELD, 1955 - A SUMMARY VIEW
Buying control of the Stanley Company in 1903, the General Electric Company operated it under the Stanley name until 1907, when it formally became a unit of General Electric, which began a large expansion of its facilities at Morningside. The rapid growth of Pittsfield dates from those years. Between 1900 and 1930, the city's population more than doubled, rising from less than 22,000 to almost 50,000.
General Electric has long played a dominant role in the life and economy of Pittsfield. Three out of four of the city's wage and salaried workers are on the General Electric payroll, the community's largest source of income. At the present time, its working force averages about 10,000 persons. Most of these live in Pittsfield, but the plant is a powerful magnet drawing workers from a wide area-even from neighboring Vermont, New York, and Connecticut.
The local General Electric plant has more than manufactur- ing functions. It is a center of important electrical research, ex- periment, and technical development. Such famed "wizards" as Cummings C. Chesney, Giuseppe Faccioli, Frank W. Peek, Jr., Karl B. McEachron, and others worked some of their marvels here.
As remarked before, the first 1,000,000 volt flash of artificial lightning was produced here. It is now a commonplace to launch man-made thunderbolts of fifteen times that power. The Pittsfield works developed and manufactured the tubes for the first bazookas used by American troops in World War II. In 1954, it dedicated the world's largest anechoic chamber (a cham- ber without echoes) to study the "singing" of transformers.
Farther to the northeast, on Dalton Avenue, is the Govern- ment Mill of Crane & Company, paper makers, with head- quarters and other mills in nearby Dalton. Long famed in the fine paper field, Crane & Company has been doing business in Dalton since 1801, when young Zenas Crane came from eastern Massachusetts to establish his first mill there, finding in the East Branch of the Housatonic the kind of clear water he need- ed to cleanse the old rags used in making paper.
8
THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
"Ladies, save your RAGS," he advertised in the old Pittsfield Sun. It was not only patriotic, "very beneficial to the community at large" by encouraging local manufactories, he informed Berkshire housewives, but he would pay a "generous price" for their rags. To collect them, he instituted a pick-up system throughout the Berkshires, using the post-riders, the mailmen of the day, for the purpose. They gathered up the precious rags in the towns, and at isolated farms on back roads, as they delivered letters and passed along the latest news and gossip.
The Crane Government Mill in Pittsfield, jealously guarded by Federal Treasury agents to prevent theft, makes the special paper stock, distinctively marked by the inclusion of red and blue fibres, which is used in all of our paper currency. By law, no one can make paper containing red and blue fibres except the mill under Government contract to provide it. This balks counterfeiters, who are trapped by the kind of paper they have to use. The Government Mill also makes all the paper for United States securities.
Another phase of paper making is represented by E. D. Jones and Sons, with a factory on Depot Street. Founded in 1845, the concern began by building all kinds of machines to order, chiefly for factories in the Berkshires. Since 1900, however, its shops have specialized in machinery to make pulp for paper, produc- ing for both the American and the export market.
If Pittsfield's economic base is now heavy industry, it was light industry-textiles-which started it on its manufacturing career. The local textile industry goes back to 1800, when a young Englishman, Arthur Scholfield, a clothier by trade, came to town and set up a carding machine a half mile west of the meetinghouse. His machine was modeled on those he had used in England. He had to make it up out of his own head, so to speak. England was rapidly striding ahead in the textile field, thanks to much newly invented equipment, and to assure her continued supremacy refused to allow the export of any such machinery.
Finally getting his machine to work, Scholfield advertised in the Pittsfield Sun that busy housewives could have their wool
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PITTSFIELD, 1955 - A SUMMARY VIEW
carded at his shop "for 121/2 cents per pound." The good wives of Pittsfield, as elsewhere, had been doing their carding, spin- ning, and weaving at home. At first, they were reluctant to trust the stranger and his even stranger machine with the precious wool upon which their families depended for clothing. But after some trial, they found that Scholfield could do a better job and save them considerable time and labor to devote to other chores. With his profits, Scholfield built a loom and went on to perfect other textile machinery, some of it the earliest of its kind in the country.
Local woolen manufacture took a long step forward in 1807. In that year Elkanah Watson came to live in Pittsfield and in- troduced to the Berkshires the Merino breed of sheep, brought from Spain and prized for their superior fleece. More and more woolen mills were built in Pittsfield at dam sites along the Housatonic and its tributary waters, and the Merinos kept them humming and prosperous for generations, stimulating Pitts- field's growth, at the same time providing a training school for manual skills and business experience of the greatest value later.
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