About the Town of Lenox

A Brief History of Lenox

Township Number 8…Yokuntown… Shire Town… Inland Newport. Lenox, Massachusetts, incorporated in 1767, was known by all these titles at one time or another.

A mountain range ran inconveniently through Township Number 8, creating two village centers: Mt. Ephraim, which became the town of Richmond, and Yokuntown, named after Yokun, the chief of a local Mahican tribe. Jonathan Hinsdale cleared a settlement in the woods in 1750. The town of Lenox, named in honor of Charles Lennox, the Third Duke of Richmond, would only have seven years between its first town meeting in 1767 and its preparations for revolt against King George the Third. Over 100 Lenox men signed the Non-Importation Agreement of 1774; one of the signers, Gen. John Paterson, trained a company of minutemen who departed Lenox within hours of receiving word of the Battle of Lexington, the opening salvo of the Revolutionary War.

The designation of Lenox, centrally located in Berkshire County, as the Shire Town in 1787 was of significance in the infancy of the new nation. That same year, the government by the people, for the people had a baptism by fire with the insurrection known as Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising instigated by too much taxation (even with representation). The shire town designation brought with it the county court. A long battle between the Berkshire municipalities for the designation ensued, which was ultimately won by Pittsfield in 1868. However, the two former courthouse buildings in Lenox survive today in new incarnations.

Beginning in 1780, the industrial center, Lenox Furnace, was fueled by water power from the Housatonic River and charcoal from the forests for the furnaces used to smelt iron and make glass. “The immense quantity of wood upon the hills will make this an easy and important business for many years to come,” wrote David Dudley Field in his 1829 “History of the County of Berkshire.” Land was also cleared for farming. The farmers used the soil, the furnaces used the trees, until the landscape was barren. The high costs of fuel for both the furnaces and the freight trains made it cheaper to import glass from Belgium to New York than to import the same product from Lenox to New York.

Meanwhile, the appointment of Charles Sedgwick, an obscure clerk in an obscure Western Massachusetts court, would have an unforeseen lasting effect on Lenox. Sedgwick moved from his native Stockbridge to Lenox in 1821 to take his position. His sister Catharine, a best- selling novelist, came to live with him. Her literary visitors became his visitors, and from the piazza at Sedgwick’s home, the Hive, guests experienced the natural beauty of the Berkshire Hills that had a salubrious effect on body and soul alike.

Sedgwick found himself acting as real estate agent for those looking for a place in the country, starting with Samuel Gray Ward in 1846. Ward’s circle of Transcendentalist friends included the Tappans, who built Tanglewood next door, and rented a cottage on the property to Nathaniel Hawthorne. [In Clark Bryan’s ‘The Book of Berkshire,’ the Little Red House of Nathaniel Hawthorne is a Lenox house, except for “the accident of a town boundary.”] The authors Sedgwick, Hawthorne and Melville formed the nucleus of what would be called the New England Lake District. For English actress Fanny Kemble, Lenox left its mark on her, a favor she returned with great joy.

With the loss of the courts to Pittsfield (and the business the courts brought), and with the failure of the furnaces, Lenox landed a new industry in the business generated by the arrival of the Gilded Age cottagers, an era which peaked at the turn of the nineteenth century. Farmers were only too eager to cash in on the selling of their acreage and move to the more fertile Midwest. Vistas, created in part by the clear-cutting of the land, were sought by wealthy society from Boston and New York, who built seasonal estates used mainly in the autumn, when the waters of Newport had cooled. The fresh air and lake views drew author Edith Wharton to build the Mount, her first “real home.”

As war, anti-trust laws, and finally, the institution of the income tax cut into the fortunes of these millionaires, the cottager period of the Inland Newport faded into local history.

But the land still had something to give to Lenox. On the vacated estates, private schools, religious seminaries, and centers for theater and music were born. In particular, there is no separating the synergistic effect of the natural setting on Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Music Inn at Wheatleigh.

Change may come to Lenox again, but one constant remains throughout its history: its scenic beauty.

[Adapted from “Images of America: Lenox,” 2016]