USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1916-1955 > Part 7
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Local transit companies ever since have perennially wished that there was "more money in them," complaining constantly of running only in the red, while their customers complain that they scarcely run at all.
Within a few years, by 1891, electric street cars with over- head trolleys were running from Park Square to Pontoosuc Lake-when they got that far. Many times they failed to make the challenging grade at Benedict Hill. Horse cars were not immediately abandoned, for the impression remained that elec- tric trolleys might not do so well in the hilly Berkshires. Even so, local trolley lines increased in number and were extended to Dalton, Hinsdale, and other towns.
Pittsfield was becoming a sizable city, with a population climbing toward 20,000. But it was still formally and legally a town, governed by the old town meeting system set up more than 125 years before, in 1761, when the population numbered little more than two hundred. In such a small community the annual town meeting, at which every eligible voter could per- sonally have his say and vote by voice on all questions and can- didates presented, was a fine instrument of responsive demo- cratic government. It was a neighborly and efficient arrange-
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ment. But it did not begin to meet the needs of a community grown almost a hundred times as large.
Consequently, on February 11, 1890, Pittsfield voted to incor- porate itself as a city. The margin in favor of the new charter was very narrow-only 146 votes-for many wished to cling to the old pattern under which a board of three selectmen was chosen at the annual town meeting to direct public affairs, dividing up the work among themselves.
Under the new charter, executive responsibilities were con- centrated in a mayor, to be elected annually. Two legislative bodies were created, a Common Council and a Board of Alder- men. These were to check on one another, and on the mayor, with the result that all three were frequently at loggerheads, paralyzing action for long periods-a fault belatedly corrected more than forty years later by charter revision. The Board of Aldermen consisted of seven members, one elected from each ward. The Common Council was twice as large, having two members from each ward. The voters also elected the members of the School Committee, two from each ward.
Pittsfield had consistently voted Democratic in national affairs since 1876 and, as its first mayor, chose a member of that party, Charles E. Hibbard, a distinguished lawyer and dis- trict attorney. The Republicans, however, controlled the joint sessions of the Aldermen and the Council by a majority of one. The new regime took office with fitting ceremony at the Acad- emy of Music on January 5, 1891.
"This ancient town is passing away," observed the chairman of the meeting, Judge Joseph Tucker, one of the older citizens. "Sorrowfully, we await its last moments. When they come, let us cry with loud acclaim, long live the City of Pittsfield." People celebrated the event at a large inaugural ball that hap- pily blended the old and the new. The gay company alternately danced the traditional village square dances and the fashionable "new" waltz and polka just coming into vogue.
A milestone had been passed, and a new era was opening. Modern Pittsfield was born at this time and began to grow very rapidly. Becoming a city in fact rather than just a large town, it
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almost doubled its population within twenty years, due less to the new frame of government than to a largely fortuitous de- velopment that has decisively shaped the community to this day.
It so happened that a man of genius, William Stanley, in- ventor of the transformer, essential for the transmission of alternating electric current, was living and working in the Berk- shires-at Great Barrington. There, in 1886, he gave that town the world's first commercial electric lighting system run by alternating current. Earlier systems used direct current, which had many disadvantages. Today, almost all electric power sys- tems in the world use alternating current, thanks to the Stanley transformer.
Stanley and his friend Cummings C. Chesney worked for a time with the Westinghouse Company. When it went into re- ceivership in 1890, both men were left without jobs or money. What happened next was told to the local Stanley Club many years later by Chesney, by then a long-time resident of Pittsfield.
"Well, what are we going to do now?" Stanley asked Ches- ney. "I'll tell you. Let's find a factory to manufacture trans- formers. They're going to be the heart of the electrical trans- mission system. You look up a factory, Chesney, and I'll do the same."
The two men separated and after several weeks of looking about, were together again in Great Barrington.
"Did you find a factory?" asked Stanley.
"Yes, in New Jersey."
"Did you get any money?"
"No," said Chesney, "never knew we had to have any."
"Well," Stanley announced, "I got some-and a factory, too -among friends of mine in Pittsfield. That's where we'll go." And go they did in November 1890.
Stanley was known to many in Pittsfield as a stockholder and officer in the Pittsfield Illuminating Company, and a number of his friends-notably, Charles Atwater, William R. Plunkett, Charles E. Hibbard, William A. Whittlesey, and William W. Gamwell-joined him in organizing the Stanley Electric Manu-
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facturing Company, capitalized at $25,000. Atwater was its first president, being soon succeeded by Gamwell.
With Chesney as works' engineer, the company began opera- tions in a small shop on Clapp Avenue, employing sixteen men in making transformers, generators, and other electrical appara- tus. It is not too much to say that modern Pittsfield was born in. this small shop, for the transformer built the modern city. Stanley and Chesney were soon joined by another engineer, John F. Kelly, to form a remarkable combination. "Stanley was the genius," it was said, "Kelly, the great consulting engineer; and Chesney, the man to get things done."
With the infant and fast-growing electric power industry clamoring for transformers and other equipment, the success of the enterprise was phenomenal from the start. It soon moved to much larger quarters on Renne Avenue, where three hundred were employed in making products bearing the label of the "SKC System"-from the initials of Stanley, Kelly, and Ches- ney. SKC equipment quickly gained a national and international market.
Earnings ran high, as much as fifty per cent a year on invest- ed capital. The original capitalization of $25,000 was increased to $50,000 in 1891; to $100,000 in 1892; to $200,000 in 1893; to $300,000 in 1895; to $500,000 in 1896. This was all the more remarkable, for the country had fallen into a period of severe depression in 1893.
In 1899, control of the company passed into the hands of John A. Roebling Sons, of Trenton, New Jersey. The latter in- creased its capitalization to $2,000,000 and began building a large factory in the Morningside section. In 1901, in its first year of operation, this factory had some 1,200 men at work making transformers, electric irons, electric fans, small motors, and other electric equipment worth approximately $1,000,000.
Two years later, in 1903, the General Electric Company, with headquarters in Schenectady, New York, bought the company and its plant. The latter continued to operate under the Stanley name down to 1907 when it was formally absorbed into the General Electric structure. With the consolidation here of all
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General Electric transformer manufacture, some of which had previously been carried on in Schenectady and at West Lynn, Massachusetts, the local plant became one of the company's larger operating units and continued to expand from year to year.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, its twenty-two fac-
. tories, with an equal number of auxiliary buildings, covered many acres in the Morningside section along the Boston and Albany railroad tracks. Working at capacity, the plant em- ployed some 6,000 people, about a sixth of the city's popula- tion. The General Electric payroll provided by far the largest source of Pittsfield's income.
Other new enterprises had been established in Pittsfield since 1890. What is now the Eaton Paper Corporation, makers of fine stationery and writing accessories, came to the city in 1893 as the Hurlbut Stationery Company, establishing itself on South Church Street in the factory once occupied by the Terry Clock Company. Later the Eaton-Hurlbut Company, reorganized in 1907 as the Eaton, Crane, and Pike Company, with Arthur W. Eaton as president, it steadily enlarged its plant until it em- ployed a thousand or more when working at capacity.
A large brewery was built in 1890 by the Berkshire Brewing Company, organized by Jacob Gimlich and John A. White. This brewery, the only one of size within miles, produced 75,- 000 barrels of beer a year and prospered down to Prohibition. Other shorter-lived enterprises tried without financial success to make trucks, the Stilson motor car, automobile parts, electric player pianos, shirts, overalls, knitted goods, weaving shuttles, and voting machines.
Agriculture, the region's main support down to the Civil War, continued its steady decline in Pittsfield, and throughout the Berkshires, as richer virgin lands in the West were opened up.
Since 1812, Pittsfield's big event of the year had been the annual three-day cattle show and fair of the Berkshire Agri- cultural Society. But it had sharply changed in character, becom- ing less a country fair than a commercial carnival. Not wishing
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to be "in the circus business," the old Society decided to dissolve in 1902, selling its large fair grounds on Wahconah Street.
Some of the older companies making woolens and other tex- tiles had fallen by the wayside-the D. and H. Stearns Com- pany, the Pomeroy Woolen Company, the J. L. and T. D. Peck Manufacturing Company, and the firm of J. Barker and Brothers with factories southwest of town, at Barkerville. But other older mills were active-those of Pontoosuc Woolen, of the S. H. and C. Russell Manufacturing Company, of Wilson and Horton. Several new large companies were formed-the W. E. Tillotson Manufacturing Company, and the Berkshire Woolen, organized in 1910 and still prospering from the busy looms in its mills along Onota Brook.
The rapid growth of industry and population stimulated the banks, enlarging the old ones and creating new ones. In 1876 Pittsfield had only two national banks, the Agricultural Na- tional and the Pittsfield National, with aggregate deposits of less than $700,000.
In 1881, the Third National was established; in 1889, the Pittsfield Co-operative Bank; in 1893, the City Savings; in 1895, the Berkshire Loan and Trust Company; in 1911, the Union Co-operative Bank.
The older banks sought larger quarters. In 1895, the Berk- shire County Savings Bank moved its offices from the Berkshire Life Insurance building, erecting the six-storied building that stands at North Street and the Park. For a time, this building housed the offices of the Berkshire Mutual Fire Insurance Com- pany, which had been steadily building up its business since its. founding in 1835.
Starting in a small cubicle in a store on North Street, the City Savings Bank bought a business block at the corner of North and Fenn streets in 1906, and two years later moved into the ample quarters it has since occupied there.
Another bank, the Agricultural National, Pittsfield's oldest and largest, moved from its long-time quarters in the Berkshire Life Insurance building to the east side-up to then, the
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"wrong" side-of North Street, where it built in 1909 the white marble structure that it still occupies.
As better rail travel and the increasing use of the automobile brought more and more vacationers to the Berkshires, to stay awhile or merely to pass through as sightseers, "summer busi- ness" became an important part in Pittsfield's economy.
The old Maplewood Institute, a private school for girls since 1827, had to close its doors and, in 1887, became a summer hotel which remained Pittsfield's most fashionable for decades. What is still the city's largest and best appointed hotel, the Wendell, long a landmark on the Square, opened its doors in 1898 at the corner of West and South streets. Later, a large wing was added along South Street, doubling its accommoda- tions.
Since 1892, Pittsfield had had two daily newspapers-the now deceased Evening Journal, founded in 1880, and the Berkshire Evening Eagle, born of the Berkshire County Eagle, a weekly that traced its ancestry back to 1827. Beginning as the Argus of Pittsfield, it became the Journal and Argus of Lenox, then the Massachusetts Eagle. Moving back to Pittsfield in 1842, it became the Berkshire County Eagle ten years later.
It led a checkered career down to 1891 when the paper was acquired by a group headed by Kelton B. Miller of Pittsfield. Staunchly Republican in politics for many years, the Eagle issued its first daily edition on May 9, 1892, made up of four large pages; 2,000 copies were sold. By 1915, its regular edition contained eighteen pages covering the news of the world- local, county, state, national, and international. Since 1918, when the Daily News ceased publication, the Eagle has been Pittsfield's only daily newspaper, and with the exception of a small Italian weekly, Il Corriere del Berkshire, its only paper.
A casualty of these years was one of Pittsfield's oldest insti- tutions, the venerable Pittsfield Sun. After 106 years of publica- tion, consistently Democratic to the last, the Sun expired on September 27, 1906, eleven days after the death of its last editor, James Harding, who had labored for twenty-seven years
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to keep the old weekly alive. The Sun Printing Company con- tinued in business and is still doing job printing.
A bustling city by 1915, Pittsfield had come far from the rural and somewhat isolated town it had been as late as the Civil War. It had been snatched up by "progress" and tied into the country's increasingly complex economic and social struc- ture. Its population now reached almost 40,000, having doubled in twenty years. Its larger industries were prospering. Many new small businesses and any number of shops and stores were being opened. One would have said, looking just at Pittsfield, that sunny years were ahead.
But the world was in crisis. World War I had broken out in the summer of 1914. Fighting was raging over most of Europe, and on more distant battlefronts. But the trouble seemed far away and not likely to involve us. President Wilson had officially proclaimed this country's neutrality, virtually tell- ing the belligerents, "a plague on both your houses."
Though there were some exceptions, Americans in general shared this view. They were not interested in Europe's age-old quarrels. They did not wish to be disturbed in their familiar ways and routines.
"Don't talk war-talk business!" was more than a phrase of the day. It was almost a command.
As the year 1915 drew to a close, business-as-usual was the order of the day in Pittsfield. The city could not foresee the tangle of events already shaping up. It little realized that within a few months many of its sons would be in uniform, that not many months later they would be fighting in the trenches in Europe, a number of them to lay down their lives on foreign soil in what was styled "a war to make the world safe for democracy."
The following section summarizes more important
developments in various fields from 1890 to 1916.
General Facilities
Though it brought its advantages, Pittsfield's rapid growth brought its problems and tensions, too, straining all local
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facilities-housing, schools, hospitals, water supply, fire and police protection, to cite a few. The residential area began to fan out, especially north of Tyler Street and out Elm and other streets to the southeast. More office buildings and stores were built, principally along North Street, which was then, as now, Pittsfield's "Main Street."
Schools
The rapid tempo of Pittsfield's growth put a heavy strain on the schools. Three new schoolhouses were built in 1896. Seven more were added by 1915. Unluckily for the taxpayers, fire entirely destroyed the high school building on lower South Street in 1895. All that was salvaged was a piano, a chair, and a teacher's desk. A new high school, built between Second Street and the Common, cost $170,000. Its predecessor, built twenty years before, had cost $16,000.
The first city council in 1891 appropriated $54,000 to run the schools that year. In 1915, the school bill totalled $252,000. For 1954, it exceeded $2,000,000, which is some measure of the physical growth of the schools and the steadily increasing educational opportunities they offer at all levels, down to kin- dergartens, which became part of the school system in 1902, after years of debate.
Another important institution providing education for Pitts- field youth was founded in 1897 when the Sisters of St. Joseph opened an academy in the convent on North Street. Two years later they built St. Joseph's Parochial School on North Pearl Street. By 1915, almost seven hundred pupils were attending St. Joseph's.
Museum
For 27 years after its construction in 1876, the Berkshire Athenaeum served as both a library and a museum. Limitations of space prevented proper exhibition of its many collections of paintings, art objects, minerals, Indian relics, and the like.
In 1903, through the benevolence of Zenas Crane of Dalton, a fine new museum building, Italian Renaissance in design, was
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opened on South Street, near Park Square, with Harlan H. Ballard, librarian of the Athenaeum, as first curator. Giving the Athenaeum much needed space for more books, the paintings and other collections there were removed to the new Museum of Natural History and Art, which was soon enlarged, thanks again to the generosity of Zenas Crane.
A south wing was added in 1905, a north wing in 1910, and in 1915 a large addition was built connecting the two wings, completing the quadrilateral. Meantime, Crane and other bene- factors had been building up the Museum's collections of art, science, and local history.
Parks and Playgrounds
The foundation of Pittsfield's public playground system was laid in 1911 when a committee of citizens incorporated the Park and Playground Association. Supported by public subscription and with some slight aid from the city, the Association bought land and established well-equipped and expertly-supervised playgrounds for youngsters on the Common, on Columbus Avenue, at Springside, near Pontoosuc Lake, and at the Russell factory village. In 1915 the municipality purchased all of the Association's land and took over the playgrounds, though for a time they still had to be supported in part by public subscrip- tion.
In 1913, a commission of five members appointed by the mayor took charge of Pittsfield's parks, soon increasing them by purchasing ten acres of woodland on the south shore of Pontoosuc Lake. Previously, the Common had been equipped with a playground and provided with walks, benches, shade trees, and the bandstand that had stood for some years on a triangular plot in front of the Athenaeum. Seventy-six acres were added to Burbank Park along Onota Lake.
Land for Springside Park was given to the city in 1910 and 1912 by Kelton B. Miller, publisher of The Berkshire Evening Eagle. It was Miller who took the lead in organizing the Bal- ance Rock Trust in 1910. This organization of twenty-six public- spirited citizens purchased a wooded tract in Lanesborough in
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order "to preserve Balance Rock and the land in connection therewith ... as a place for the study of and experiments in forestry, and as a resort for sightseers and students of nature, and for other public purposes." Known as Rolling Rock in earlier days, the curious boulder and the land around it were presented to the city as a public park in 1916.
Hospitals
Hospital and related facilities had to be greatly enlarged to meet the city's needs. A new House of Mercy was built in 1902, across from its old site on North Street. Another hospital, the Hillcrest Surgical, opened in 1908 at Springside Avenue and North Street. Organized in 1908, the Pittsfield Visiting Nurse Association provided invaluable aid for those "otherwise un- able to secure assistance in time of illness," besides teaching cleanliness and proper care of the sick.
Through funds donated by Dr. Frederick Shurtleff Coolidge and his wife, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, founder of the famed South Mountain Chamber Music festival, the Pittsfield Anti- tuberculosis Association established in 1912 a sanatorium south- west of the city, near Lebanon Avenue, buying for the purpose a large farmhouse with many acres of ground. Later, in 1915, with funds left by the will of Dr. Coolidge, who had died of tuberculosis, construction began on the Frederick Shurtleff Coolidge Memorial Hospital. Built near the farmhouse, Mrs. Coolidge gave it an endowment of $100,000. Situated on fifty- three acres of ground, the two hospitals could care for thirty patients.
Water Supply
Water supply for the expanding city posed a serious and continuing problem. Older reservoirs were enlarged. A new small reservoir on Mill Brook, in Lenox, was built in 1896, and another on Roaring Brook, in Lenox and Washington. In 1909, after two years of drought, the waters of Onota Lake had to be pumped into the mains which were being extended in all directions. A major source of new supply became available
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in 1912 with completion of the Farnham dam and reservoir at a cost of almost $800,000.
Fire Protection
Up to 1892 the fire department had consisted of four volun- teer companies. The new city charter changed this, putting fire- fighting on a regular paid basis. By 1905, the fire department had fourteen men on regular duty and a "call force" of fifty. By 1915, the force had been increased to thirty-five firemen and a call force of eighteen.
The present central fire station at the head of School Street was built in 1895. A brick station on Tyler Street in the Morn- ingside area was added in 1906, and the old wooden fire sta- tion in West Pittsfield was enlarged in 1914. Constantly aug- menting its equipment, the department bought its first auto- mobile fire truck in 1911. By 1916 the entire department was motorized, which gave citizens a far greater sense of security against the ravages of fire.
Police
In 1891, Pittsfield had a small police force of only fourteen men, with headquarters in the old village lockup on School Street. Adequate for an earlier day, it was soon bulging with involuntary guests as the population increased. As early as 1900 it was pronounced a "disgrace," but nothing was done to re- place it for decades.
Pittsfield saw its first "Black Maria" in 1903 when a one- horse patrol wagon began to provide culprits and suspects the comfort of a "ride" to the station. Previously, they had had to propel themselves toward incarceration. The patrol wagon, it appears, was not called out any oftener than in other com- munities of like size-indeed, less often, for Pittsfield's law- abiding record has been good.
By 1915, the force numbered thirty-nine-a captain, an in- spector, a sergeant, a matron, two drivers and thirty-three patrolmen, who worked 12-hour shifts six days a week. The department was under the command of Chief of Police John L.
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Sullivan, who took office that year at a salary of $1,200 annual- ly, soon raised to $1,800. Sullivan headed the department for more than thirty years, down to his retirement in 1947. A large man with a fine presence, given to speaking his mind freely and forcefully in his own distinctive idiom, Sullivan was one of Pittsfield's more colorful personalities in recent times, as will appear.
Churches
Down the years, especially after the founding of the Stanley works and their expansion by General Electric, a marked change had occurred in the composition of Pittsfield's population, and in the ratio between the native and foreign born. In the begin- ning and for a century thereafter, most of the people in Pitts- field were Protestant and of Yankee stock. In the 1840s, with the coming of the railroad, some Irish settled in the town and soon became "old families." Later, especially after 1890, came many people of other descent to work in the growing factories -Italians, Poles, and French Canadians, among the larger groups. Almost all of these were Catholic by tradition and per- sonal belief.
Catholic
Catholic services had been held in Pittsfield as early as 1835 when visiting priests came occasionally to hold meetings and administer the rites in private homes. By 1844 there were enough of the faith to build a small wooden church on Mel- ville Street.
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