My book, The Berkshire Cottages, is now 40 years old. Old enough to be irrelevant, and yet, at a recent PB meeting, the question was asked: how many Berkshire Cottages are there? Sadly, the answer given was 3.

During America’s Gilded Age, there were 93 Berkshire Cottages built in South County alone. Great swaths of Stockbridge are covered with Berkshire Cottages. Cottages were contiguous or continuous from the intersection of Pine Street and Prospect Hill Road to the grounds of Tanglewood, from Main and Pine to the golf course. Others dot the landscape along Route 183, Old Stockbridge Road, and all over town.

By definition, a Berkshire Cottage is “more than 20 rooms on no fewer than 20 acres”, so whether the proposed zoning bylaw redefines the property size from 80 to 20 acres, many Cottages will be involved.

The acreage covered by the Cottages today, even after the sale of land over the decades just on Old Stockbridge Road is: Elm Court (300+ acres), and Merrywood (current acreage unknown). Even more important, many of the reuses of the old mansions are nonprofits: Naumkeag (48 acres), Norman Rockwell Museum (36 acres) Tanglewood (538 acres), Kripalu (125 acres), and Austen Riggs (unknown acreage in the center of town). Wheatleigh, a for profit business, has 22 acres. All of these are former Berkshire Cottages – over 1000 acres. Imagine if any of these, nonprofit or for profit, go out of business or want to sell land to stay afloat; Stockbridge will be forever changed.

Buildings are the repositories of our memories. Tear them down and there is a rent in the fabric of the Stockbridge story. Who were we, who are we, and who do we want to be? How did Norman Rockwell pick Stockbridge as America’s hometown? Why was Stockbridge called the “American Lake District”? Why did Carnegie and Vanderbilt call Stockbridge home? The answers constitute our Stockbridge story, and the story is inexorably contained in the walls of the Berkshire Cottages.