A Tourist Guide to the Berkshires

1. Introduction:

Characterized by rolling hills and peaks, and dissected by river valleys, the Berkshires, considered southern extensions of Vermont's Green Mountains, traverse Western Massachusetts and Connecticut, diminishing in elevation and profile from both north to south and west to east. Named by Sir Francis Bernard to honor his home county in England, they constitute both a highland geologic and cultural region, attracting considerable tourism during the summer months. cali trainwreck

2. History:

Wind, weather, and erosional chiseling of once towering mountains that formed the Housatonic, Green, and Hoosic River valleys after retreat of the last ice age some 25,000 years ago created the current hills and low-elevation peaks.

Mohican Indians, who had defected from the Hudson River Iroquois settlements during the mid-1600s, served as the Berkshire area's first documented inhabitants and were considered instrumental in teaching white men basic survival skills, such as land clearing for crop cultivation and maple tree tapping for syrup collecting.

Energy-harnessing industries, attracted by the area's numerous rivers, used abundantly available raw materials, including sand, granite, limestone, and marble from quarries and iron and clay in mines, to produce lumber, grain, paper, and textiles, in the process attracting the work force and their families needed to run their mills and plants.

Instrumental in the transfer of these products and materials, the Hoosac Tunnel, facilitating the state's first northern rail route, linked Boston on the eastern seaboard with the Midwest.

Generating considerable interest in the region, many notable 19th- and 20th-century authors and visual artists included area settings and themes in their works.

Today, the Berkshires are synonymous with nature, country inns, historic sights, art, theater, film, and music.

3. Orientation:

Other than regional gateways, such as Pittsfield Municipal Airport-which are primarily served by private and corporate aircraft-there are no Berkshire-served scheduled airline facilities, the three closest airports being those in Albany, New York (52 road miles), Hartford, Connecticut (103 miles), and Boston, Massachusetts (143 miles).

Consisting of 32 towns, the region, which can be subdivided into northern, central, and southern sections, requires an hour-and-a-half to a two-hour drive, without stopping, to traverse. Accessed by Route 7 in the west and Route 8 for a portion slightly to the east of it, its picturesque, seemingly time-suspended, quintessential New England towns, framed by inns, white church steeples, art galleries, and crafts and antiques shops, are often dissected by either redesignated or rerouted arteries, including Route 2 in North Adams, Route 7 in Pittsfield, Route 102/Main Street in Stockbridge, and Route 7/Main Street in Great Barrington. Moon rocks molly

4. Northern Berkshires:

North Adams:

North Adams, as its name indicates, is the principle town in the Northern Berkshires. Once the bustling hub of textiles and shoes during the 19th-century, it has since set its sights on education and culture with the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts. Much of its history can be traced at the Western Gateway Heritage State Park.

Western Gateway Heritage State Park:

Occupying the site of the former Boston and Main Railroad's freight yard, the park, comprised of several restored buildings that once housed cargo and shippable commodities, have been converted into shops, dining venues, and a museum surrounding a cobblestone courtyard, now all listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The museum, toted as "celebrating the building of the Hoosac Tunnel and the age of the Iron Horse," depicts North Adams life at the turn of the 19th-century and the impact both the tunnel and the railroad industry exerted on it and northern Berkshire County.

Laying under a vast and shallow sea some 450 million years ago, according to the museum, the North Adams area extended, in coast line, as far west as Ohio and its greater depths lurked east of Boston. Its Hoosac, Berkshire, Taconic, and Appalachian mountains, themselves formed 225 million years later when the pressure created by North American and African continental plate collisions on the old coastal seabeds pushed underwater rock back, resulting in the folded and over-thrust New England mountain ranges present today.

After the plates had separated and the Atlantic Ocean had opened, the current landscape of peaks, valleys, and plains took form, while the subsequent glacial period, characterized by waves of advancement and retreat, carried huge boulders southward, in the process tearing and grinding the mountains into lower-rising projections.

As the climate warmed, ice, melting from and released by the glaciers, formed vast rivers, their rock, clay, and sand deposits ultimately filling valleys. Water accumulations, now unable to escape, collected into ice sheet edge lakes.

Isolated, the Hoosac Valley was only accessible by steep and treacherous mountain passes, which required days to traverse, and attacks by the French and their allies were not uncommon, yet its advantages conversely proved significant: trees and stones provided raw material for building, the soil was fertile and facilitated crop growing, the powerful rivers served as energy sources, sand provided the foundation for glass making, and iron was transformed into tools.

Although Fort Massachusetts, erected in 1741 and the westernmost one created by the colonial government in Boston to defend its land, was attacked by Indians, it served to mark the location of the future town of North Adams. Replaced by a second structure, it enjoyed a more enduring fate after the 1763 Treaty of Ghent was signed, ensuring French and Indian withdrawal.

British soldiers constituted early Hoosac settlers, who engaged in farming, milling, and woodworking, and it was renamed Adams to honor Boston patriot Samuel Adams after the Revolutionary War.

Growth, prompted by Hoosac River generating power, spawned some dozen small mills, which were able to produce lumber and ground grain, until the burgeoning population necessitated the 1878 creation of a second, separate settlement-that of North Adams.

No greater impact on the area, however, was that created with the 1875 opening of the 4.75-mile-long Hoosac Tunnel. An engineering marvel for its day and the longest such railroad passage in North America east of the Rocky Mountains, it was bored by means of manual labor and rudimentary picks, hammers, and nitroglycerin explosives.