USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1916-1955 > Part 2
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Most of the mills are gone now. As elsewhere in New Eng- land, the textile industry in Pittsfield has declined.
But there remain several substantial establishments-the largest being that of the Berkshire Woolen Company. It manu- factures only quality goods. For men's fabrics it uses the trade name of "Berkshire," and for women's, "Cerey"-a sort of acrostic made up of the last letters of the words fabric, style, color, vogue, and quality. During World War II the company made millions of yards of cloth for military uniforms. The Berkshire's present buildings on Peck's Road, above an old dam site on Onota Brook, rank among the most attractive and efficient textile mills in the country. Since the company produces only for a special and rather stable market, it normally main- tains a high level of steady employment.
Pittsfield makes specialties in another textile-silk-manu- factured by the A. H. Rice Company, which in 1878 began spinning silk thread. Some was sold as sewing thread. The rest
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THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
was made into braids for uniforms, baby bonnets, caskets, and other purposes. "Rice" is a name long known in the silk trade throughout the country. During World War II the company began spinning nylon thread, furnishing quantities of this and nylon parachute cord to the armed services.
Proud to be known as a "city of artisans," Pittsfield owes its prominence and prosperity as an industrial center less to natural advantages and resources than to the skills and ingenuity of its people. These trace their ancestry back to many countries. At first, and for many generations, they consisted almost wholly of Yankees of English stock, having come from older towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In the early 1840s, with the building of the railroad, came the Irish who were laying the roadbed and spiking down rails. Seeing Pittsfield and liking it and its opportunities, many chose to stay, making their homes here.
Later came thousands of other stock-Italians, Poles, Ger- mans, Jews, Ukrainians, Portuguese, Greeks, and French Cana- dians, among others. For the most part, these groups have re- tained their traditional forms of worship and, to some extent, their social customs. But they have actively entered community life and become as much a part of Pittsfield as the oldest families.
In 1950, almost nine out of ten residents of Pittsfield were American born; most were "Berkshire-borners." Since the last great wave of immigration in 1913, when more than 2,000,000 hopefuls came to our shores, the percentage of foreign born in Pittsfield's population has steadily declined, both relatively and absolutely.
Residential Pittsfield largely consists of modest single-family houses, usually with trees about them and space enough for a. lawn and garden. The houses in the new outlying districts are often very attractive. Well spaced and well designed, with: pleasing lines, they tend to be semi-Colonial in style, or of the low, single-floor "ranch" type, the current fashion. In certain sections there remain some old, wooden, box-like "tenements,"
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PITTSFIELD, 1955 - A SUMMARY VIEW
crowding the sidewalk and jammed side by side, but these are disappearing, chiefly because renters shun them.
Pittsfield has an official Planning Board to guide the city's development. On its recommendation a zoning ordinance was passed in 1953, based on a master blueprint drawn by pro- fessional experts in the field.
The zoning ordinance divided the city into fourteen "use" districts, under three main categories-residential, commercial, and manufacturing. It defined the areas where light industry and heavy industry might be established. It laid down the mini- mum width and minimum size of building lots. It restricted the area where two-family houses might be built. It decreed that in all future building, whether residential or non-residential, pro- vision had to be made for off-street parking. For purposes of study, the Planning Board has divided the city into twenty- three proposed residential neighborhoods. Studies of three of these proposed neighborhoods have been completed, and more are under way.
But Pittsfield is not just its citified part. It is countryside, hill- side, and lakeside, too. It is farms, and mountain trails, and ski slopes, and leaping brooks, and deep woods where, though only a few miles from Park Square, there is no faintest echo or re- minder of the bustle of the city. In season, there is fishing and hunting within Pittsfield's boundaries which encompass more than forty-two square miles. Among the cities of Massachusetts, Pittsfield's area is exceeded only by Boston's.
At the northwest corner of the city, on the slopes of Honwee Mountain, is a state forest-the Pittsfield State Forest, extend- ing over into Lanesborough and Hancock. Some 4,000 acres of quiet and unspoiled beauty, it is dotted with picnic grounds and camping sites, criss-crossed by many foot, bridle, and ski trails rolling up hill and down dale-among others, Ghost Trail, Shadow Trail, and the Skyline Trail, much traveled both sum- mer and winter, for the Pittsfield State Forest is one of Berk- shire's finest year-round playgrounds. Every winter week-end, when conditions are right, special snow trains from New York pull into Pittsfield with thousands of skiers eager to race down
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THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
the white slopes of Honwee, or try their skills on the runs down Yokun Seat Mountain a few miles southwest of the city.
At some time or other in their journeyings, millions of Americans-and many from Canada, as well-visit the Berk- shires to view the splendor of its hills and sample the charms of the spacious old towns in the valleys, so distinctively New England.
Every summer tens of thousands come-many come regularly year after year-to attend the South Mountain chamber music concerts in Pittsfield, as well as the great music festival at Tanglewood in Lenox a few miles away and the classic and modern dance festival at Jacob's Pillow in Becket.
Almost all of those who come to the Berkshires, at some point in their tour, pay a visit to Pittsfield. The tourist trade, the vacation business, has become an increasingly important asset in Pittsfield's life, as elsewhere in the Berkshires.
When was Pittsfield born ? Under what circumstances? What influences and accidents have shaped it? How have its people lived down the years? What have they thought and felt? What have they achieved? Who have been their leaders?
To tell the story, let us go back to the beginning.
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II
Pittsfield's First Half Century 1761-18II
S TARTING IN 1628, the great Puritan migration to New Eng- land came to full tide in 1630, continuing for more than a decade. The early-comers had scarcely got settled in and around Boston when the more restless and adventuresome began push- ing westward through the Massachusetts forests, soon reaching the Connecticut River valley. Springfield was founded as early as 1636. Other frontier settlements appeared up and down the valley. But here the westward surge halted for almost a century, blocked by the Berkshire Barrier, a formidable wall of rock and tangled forest.
Trappers and Indian traders early prowled westward through the wilderness into the upper valley of the Housatonic. But settlers hesitated to follow, partly because the intervening ter- rain was so rough, partly from fear of the Indians, for the fierce and powerful Mohawk, coming in from New York along what is still known as the Mohawk trail, frequently swept along the valley in their raids.
Conflicting claims to the territory caused confusion. Both Massachusetts and the New York colony asserted jurisdiction- New York on the basis of old Dutch claims that the boundaries of New Netherland extended eastward from the Hudson to the Connecticut River. Possession always being nine-tenths of the law, Massachusetts was very anxious to extend her settle- ments westward over the Berkshire Barrier. The difficulties were enormous. But at length, in 1725, Matthew Noble and others from Westfield founded Sheffield on the banks of the
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THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
Housatonic, buying a large tract there from Chief Konkapot of the local Indians.
A group of New Yorkers, mostly Dutchmen, claimed that they had already bought not only that tract, but all of the upper Housatonic valley, a claim that was impatiently brushed aside. More Massachusetts men came in with their families to settle, slowly moving up the valley. What is now South Egremont was founded in 1730; Stockbridge, in 1734; and Lenox, first known as Yokuntown, in 1750.
Meantime, settlement had been attempted higher up the valley, where Pittsfield now stands. The original impulse came from Boston. In 1735, complaining that it bore an undue tax burden, that it contributed a fifth of all taxes paid in the colony, Boston asked the General Court to grant it, as a measure of relief, some of the "wild lands" in Hampshire County, which then embraced most of western Massachusetts. The General Court made a grant, giving it the right to lay out in the wilder- ness three townships, each six miles square, one of which be- came Pittsfield.
Boston had no idea of settling these townships itself, regard- ing them rather as so much real estate to be turned into money as quickly as possible. In 1726, even before a survey had been made and its boundaries fixed, Boston sold the Pontoosuc (Pittsfield) township at public auction. It brought £1,320, being sold to Jacob Wendell, a prosperous Boston merchant of Dutch descent, born in Albany, New York.
To Wendell, too, this was a real estate deal. He had no intention of becoming a settler himself. Rather, he would run a survey, stake the corners of the township, divide up the land, and sell lots to those willing to brave the dangers and hardships of a wild frontier.
Wendell has long been honored as the founder of Pittsfield. In a sense, he was. But there is no evidence that he ever laid eyes on the lands he bought here. So many of our towns were similarly "founded" by absentee speculators, with small men- tion of and less honor to those who were first actually on the ground to build their homes there.
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PITTSFIELD'S FIRST HALF CENTURY: 1761-1811
Wendell hired Captain John Huston, of Northampton, to run a survey. As laid out, the township was not exactly six miles square. A notch was left in the northwest corner where Honwee Mountain jogs in, perhaps because Huston found it too difficult to survey, thinking that it was worthless in any case. No farmer would buy a mountain side. Allowance was made for 1,000 acres previously granted to and laid out by Colonel John Stoddard of Northampton, founder of a family long prominent in Pittsfield.
Also, a strip about a fifth of a mile wide was added along the western boundary, to compensate for the "waste ponds" in the township. Hungry for "first-rate Arable land," the early- comers scorned these "waste ponds" which included Lake Onota and their share of Pontoosuc Lake, now among the com- munity's prized assets.
Huston laid out two wide main roads that intersected near the center of the township. One became East and West Streets; the other North and South Streets. Along the east-west road and a smaller road to the south, he staked out sixty-four great "settling lots," each with a hundred acres more or less .*
Wendell was now ready for business. But business was bad. Wanting a general manager, someone to stimulate sales, he took in a relative as partner-a rich New York patroon, Philip Livingston, lord of the huge Livingston Manor along the Hud- son. Ignoring a proviso in the General Court's original grant that settlers were to be Massachusetts men and not "foreigners," Livingston brought in a number of New York Dutchmen in the hope that they would buy lots at Pontoosuc. The Dutchmen, however, were not at all impressed. They would not take the lands "as a gift," they declared, which left business at a stand- still.
Hearing of this, Surveyor Huston interested some friends in Westfield who bought forty of the "Dutch-despised" lots for £1,200-almost as much as Wendell had paid for the entire
*For details on early Pittsfield, see the two-volume history of Pittsfield from 1734 to 1876, by J. E. A. Smith, who did tremendous spadework in unearthing the origins of Pittsfield and its story for a century or more. This and the following chapter, a brief review of important events down to 1861, are based largely on Smith, though the facts are somewhat differently stressed and some new material has been added.
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THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
township. The work of clearing the lots began early in 1743. But work soon ceased when the men fled, alarmed by rumors of war with the French and Indians. Five years passed before any returned to start over again. Log cabins went up, fields were cleared, and soon Pontoosuc had its first family-that of Solo- mon Deming, from Wethersfield, Connecticut, who rode in on horseback in 1752 with his young wife Sarah on the pillion behind him.
Others followed, some to rise to prominence in the early town-among them, David Bush, young Nathaniel Fairfield with his bride, Oliver Root, Hezekiah Jones, Deacon Stephen Crofoot and his brother Simeon, Captain Charles Goodrich, "driving the first cart and team which ever entered the town."
Also came Colonel William Williams, a rather flamboyant character, who brought a new vigor to affairs. Son of a minister, a Harvard graduate, once a doctor and then a merchant, he had subsequently become a soldier in the British service. No name in Pittsfield's early annals looms larger than that of Williams, who served the town and county in any number of capacities from time to time-as chief justice of the common pleas, as moderator of the town meeting, as selectman, assessor, clerk, hog-reeve, colonel of militia, and representative to the General Court.
By 1753, when the settlement sheltered some two hundred people, it was incorporated as "The Proprietors of the Settling- lots in the Township of Pontoosuck." Under the charter, the settlement was virtually a private corporation run for the ben- efit of the proprietors. They exercised all powers. Only they had a voice in community affairs. The new government levied taxes for roads, bridges, and other public improvements, and for building a school and a meetinghouse. By law, every Mas- sachusetts town had to provide for schooling and the support of an "orthodox" ministry. "Orthodox" signified Congregation- al-and no other.
Building was again interrupted. With the outbreak of the French and Indian War, the town was almost depopulated as men fled with their families from this exposed frontier. The
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PITTSFIELD'S FIRST HALF CENTURY: 1761-1811
town records are a blank from August 1754, to September 1758, by which time some settlers were beginning to return, protected by three small redoubts-Fort Anson, Fort Fairfield, and a third on high ground along the southwest shore of Lake Onota.
The common lands were now divided up into great "squares" containing from 230 to 326 acres each and allotted to the pro- prietors in proportion to the shares each had in the enterprise. Some 5,600 acres fell to Wendell, including the beautiful Canoe Meadows with the knoll upon which a house was later built by his grandson, the literary Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who spent some summers in Pittsfield-"seven blessed sum- mers," he wrote, "which stand out in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beautiful dream of the holy dreamer."
Proprietory government came to an end in 1761 when the settlement was incorporated as the town of Pittsfield, named in honor of the great British statesman, the elder William Pitt, always a friend of the colonies. At the same time, the western part of Hampshire was cut off and set up as Berkshire County. Sheffield was designated to be, "for the present, the shire or county town." The General Court decreed, however, that the county courts should sit in Pittsfield twice a year for the con- venience of central and northern Berkshire.
In May 1761, Pittsfield's first town meeting gathered at Deacon Stephen Crofoot's house on Elm Street. The first order of business was to elect officers-a moderator (David Bush), a clerk (William Williams), a treasurer (David Bush), three selectmen and assessors (William Williams, David Bush, and Josiah Wright), a constable (Jacob Ensign), three highway surveyors (David Bush, Gideon Goodrich and Eli Root), two fence-viewers (Nathaniel Fairfield and William Francis), two wardens (Solomon Deming and David Noble), a sealer of leather and of weights and measures (Simeon Crofoot), and two deer-reeves (John Remington and Reuben Gunn) .
A few families, it is clear, monopolized the more important offices, a situation that persisted for years. Yet the new govern-
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THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
ment was far more representative and democratic than the old, though it was certainly not democracy as we know it today. Only men of property could vote, only those with an estate or a "faculty" rated at £20 a year.
Moving ahead, Pittsfield began to improve and extend its roads, to build more and better bridges. In consonance with its new dignity, it made other "improvements," building stocks and a whipping post, and a workhouse in which to jail vagrants. Pittsfield welcomed only men of property, freeholders. No mat- ter what their character, poor itinerants were "warned" out of town. Work went forward on the meetinghouse, with workers receiving, according to a good old custom, liberal potions of rum to cheer them on and hasten their labors. But progress was painfully slow. Begun in 1761, the meetinghouse was not properly finished nine years later when the congregation re- luctantly agreed to accept it as it was.
A small, wooden, barn-like structure, it stood approximately on the site of the present First Church of Christ, in the shadow of the towering tree that became renowned and beloved as the grand Old Elm. At the back was the burying ground. Beyond were fields dotted with a few trees and many stumps. Here on these stumps, if the weather was good, the members of the con- gregation ate their lunch during the brief "nooning" between the two Sunday services, morning and afternoon. After eating, the women exchanged the latest news, children moved about decorously (for this was a Puritan Sabbath), as the men stepped across the road to enjoy in Deacon James Easton's tavern their Sunday mug of flip, then as traditional and well regarded as two-hour sermons.
Pittsfield had almost as much difficulty in finding an accept- able minister as in finishing the meetinghouse. The town showed itself to be quite "choosey," a trait that Pittsfield seems not to have lost in matters either secular or divine. Not many years ago, so the story goes, there was a sign in the wings of a Boston theatre designed to give pause to any performers whose heads had been turned by easy success.
"If you think you're good," read the sign, "try Pittsfield."
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PITTSFIELD'S FIRST HALF CENTURY: 1761-1811
Beginning in 1759, the town made trial of five ministers, one after the other, and found them wanting. At length, in 1764, it made a happy choice, deciding to "settle" the Reverend Thomas Allen, at a salary of £60 a year, plus forty cords of firewood. Born at Northampton in 1743, a recent graduate of Harvard, Allen was only twenty-one at this time.
Entering his new duties with great zeal, the pastor brought in thirty-one new communicants his first year. He was also very active in civic and political affairs-being far too active, growled some, who later charged him with "indiscreet zeal," principally because he was an outspoken democrat of the Jeffer- sonian school. But in spite of many trials and tribulations, Par- son Allen continued to labor in this corner of the vineyard till his death more than forty years later, founding a family that was prominent in Pittsfield for generations.
In 1764, after much talk, the town began building its first schools-three of them, all "well shingled," with wooden floors, a brick chimney for the wood stove, and four large windows, with twelve panes of glass to the window. The largest school, twenty-two feet square, gave its name to School Street. By the time of the Revolution, Pittsfield had five schools, one in each of the school districts-east, northeast, center, west, and southwest.
The town had been growing and thriving. More and more grist mills, sawmills, and fulling mills had been built along the Housatonic and its larger tributaries. More and more ground had been cleared and put to the plow. The number of livestock had greatly increased. Many farms were now producing a sur- plus. Markets for this produce had been found to the west, principally because transportation was easier and cheaper that way. Wheat, cheese, wool, bacon, smoked beef, salt pork, hides, and other things were carted to the New York towns of Kinder- hook, Hudson, and Albany, where they were transshipped by water down the Hudson to the larger centers on the coast. By 1772, Pittsfield had more than 800 inhabitants, some of them very prosperous.
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THE HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
Writing to relatives at this time, urging them to come to Pittsfield and share its prosperity and blessings, Colonel Wil- liam Williams became almost ecstatic. The soil was good, the air was good, the temperature was good, almost everything was good. He had formerly suffered much sickness and excruciating pain, he wrote, but not since coming to Pittsfield. In fourteen years he had not missed public worship.
"All my doctor's bill has been a gallipot or two for the itch And another indisputable proof of the goodness of the country is the prolific behavior of the female sex among us. Barren women beget (if not bring forth) sons. Women that have left off for 5, 6, 7, or 9 years begin anew ... as many as two at a birth, after residing a suitable time among us. And to mention but one thing (though I might mention many more), no man or woman of but common understanding that ever came and got settled among us wished themselves back.
"The air suited them, they felt frisk and alert, or a some- thing endeared their situation to them; this with regard to the women. The men perceived soon the difference in the soil; and put what you would upon it, it would yield beyond what they were acquainted with. This prompted them to labor, and when they came in, either by day or night, their wives would give them a kind hearty welcome." So encouraged, many a man arriving as "poor as a church mouse" had made a fortune. Most of the first settlers were prosperous.
"Come to this town and see Goodrich, Brattle, Bush, Hub- bard, Wright, Crowfoot, and Ensign, who, strictly speaking, were in debt when they came . . . Come and see ... But delays are dangerous; we have had five wholesome families come in this winter . . . I can assure you our land grows in repute faster than any around us."
But Pittsfield's prospects, however bright, were shadowed by a cloud that was overspreading the whole land. Tension be- tween Britain and the colonies was rapidly rising. The conflict resounded throughout the Berkshires, causing a deep split in all communities as matters reached the breaking point-with the loyalists, or Tories, arrayed against the Whigs, the Liberty
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PITTSFIELD'S FIRST HALF CENTURY: 1761-1811
Boys, the "patriots." The leader of the Pittsfield Tories was Woodbridge Little, the first lawyer in the town. Behind him stood the powerful Williams and Stoddard clans. Temporarily commanding the town meeting, this group had Pittsfield offi- cially condemn the Boston Tea Party as "unnecessary and highly unwarrantable," as an "extraordinary and illegal transaction"- which it certainly was. Those responsible for the "riot," the resolution concluded, should be brought "to condign punish- ment"-which, if carried out, would have meant the hanging of Sam Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Warren, and all of Boston's leaders in the struggle against the Crown.
But the Pittsfield Tories were quickly routed. Led by Parson Allen, the local Liberty Boys had the town protest the closing of the port of Boston, the quartering of British troops on the populace in the seacoast towns, the suspension of the sessions of the General Court, the prohibition against holding any town meeting in the colony without the express permission of the royal governor. Pittsfield joined the general movement through- out the colonies to boycott British goods until these "intolerable acts" were repealed. It created a local Committee of Corre- spondence to join Sam Adams' rapidly expanding network of revolutionary organizations. Neighboring towns did the same.
"The popular rage is very high in the Berkshires," the royal governor at Boston complained, "and makes its way rapidly to the rest."
In the Berkshires, the first organized resistance to royal authority occurred in Great Barrington. In 1774, more than 1,500 men assembled there, many of them armed, and "per- suaded" the county judges, all holding a royal commission, to suspend their hearings. The judges promptly fled, and this was the last royal court to sit in the Berkshires.
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