CONNECTIONS: How did Berkshire County become a destination?

The State Line Tunnel leads into the Berkshires. year unknown. Photo courtesy of Picryl.

Links: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history consider it irrelevant; Many who love history consider it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest guide to how we got here: America in the 21st century.

Ever since shortly after the last passenger train left the station, people have been wondering when the train will return to South Berkshire? The train ran in stages between 1963 (New Haven Line) and 1968 (Penn Central RR). There was a brief respite between 1969 and 1971 when the Penn Central returned, but on April 30, 1971 she permanently ceased all passenger service.

Granted, 51 years later in 2022, passenger rail service (Amtrak) returned. There is limited rail service – weekends only, summer months only, New York Penn Station to Pittsfield, via Albany-Rensselaer only. It has a nice name: Berkshire Flyer. Will the Flyer – a daily train for weekend tourists – have a future? Will gas prices make tourists prefer trains to cars?

More often, change is the result of a confluence of events rather than a single event, and the world is changing in more ways than one. Next to the road to the Berkshires is the Internet Highway. If people choose to move here and work from home over the internet, the train journey may not matter. Or is MP Smitty Pignatelli right? Is the future of rail transport a west-east rather than a south-north route? That would be a commuter line — at least twice a day on weekdays, not weekends, rolling through Springfield, Worchester, Boston and beyond, dropping off Berkshire residents at workplaces and creating a sleeping community.

What supported trains the first time? The train arrived in 1826, the steam engine screaming. The first train rolled into West Stockbridge in Berkshire County in 1838. Train service in and out of Berkshire County continued for 133 years. A neighbor with a long memory said, “I remember when the trains came to the Berkshires and fewer cars were clogging the streets.” What kept it going? First comes the desire to go there, and then comes the way to get there.

We love our Berkshires, but we have to admit that Berkshire County is next door to nowhere in every direction. In the days of horse and stagecoach travel, it was an easy distance to nothing. It was – and is – 50 miles from any port and 135 miles from either New York or Boston. So it was amazing that so many came here at all. The secret is that Berkshire County was at the junction of all these New England roads. All these roads went through this rural, remote place. It was slow going, 15 1/2 hours by stagecoach from Connecticut to Albany. They needed a place to stop and they stopped here.

By the mid-1840s, Berkshire County – and South Berkshire in particular – was being referred to as the “American Lake District”. Both Henry Ward Beecher and Herman Melville are named, but it matters less who thought of it first and more what the new name means. In part it reflected the physical beauty of Berkshire County and its resemblance to the English Lake District, but the name also spoke of the immigration of a large number of American writers and painters. Herman Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, George Inness, Frederick Church, William Cullen Bryant, Henry David Thoreau and more came to live and work here. The writers and painters provided the first wave of fame, and South County became and remained a vacation destination.

In July 1843 an advertisement in the Pittsfield Sun jubilantly announced that the train, averaging 25 miles per hour, completed the 15 1/2 hour stagecoach journey from Albany in less than two hours. The advert went on, “The passenger (train) carriages…were large, roomy and well-ventilated, about 50 feet long, furnished with separate upholstered mahogany chairs…for the 80 passengers.” The reporter praises the view from the window and ” the stillness and unwavering stability” of the ride.

All of this was likened to the wheels of the stagecoach bouncing over ledges of roots and rocks on narrow streets. Since the train journey was faster, travelers could travel farther. As it was more convenient, the trip was considered part of the holiday. Just as in Pittsfield today, weekend passenger service was one train per day – clearly a tourist service, but the county has always been more than a tourist destination.

The Berkshires were also a manufacturing center. The county grew things, mined things, and made things. Just as the plane would shrink the planet, the train brought Berkshire County hours closer to ports and major population centers.

It’s hard to think of many things that have impacted Berkshire County’s economic development more than the arrival of the train. The transportation of goods in and out of the county boosted the local economy. The relocation of people within the county made it possible to fill jobs wherever the county’s economy grew. Tourists from New York and Boston found the Berkshires an easy target. Artists and writers who traveled to the Berkshires by train made it the “Western outpost of the American Renaissance.” The fame they brought to the Berkshires through their words and pictures attracted the Berkshire Cottagers – the lavish summertime permanent guests. And the rest, as they say, is history – our history.

If the speed of rail travel has shaped us, what will happen next? How will the speed of the internet change us? How will it shape the next phase of Berkshire’s history? Will we be a bedroom community, or a rural housing development for an electronic workplace, or something even more unimaginable? Is there a way to select the consequences before we select the action?