Becket, Massachusetts
A Short History of Becket
From a 1765 charter named for an English estate, to a hill town that ran on lumber and granite, to a farm that became the country’s most famous dance festival, to a town that voted to build its own internet.
Chartered in 1765
English families began settling these hills around 1740, and on June 21, 1765 the plantation was incorporated as the town of Becket. The name came from far away: Royal Governor Sir Francis Bernard, a native of Berkshire in England, borrowed it from Beckett Hall, an estate in the village of Shrivenham back home. None of the first settlers had any tie to the place. It was simply the name the governor chose to put on a new town in the county he had named for his own English county, Berkshire.
A Town Built on Its Woods
For most of its first century and a half Becket lived off what its hills and streams could produce. There was lumber and there were granite quarries, and there were dairy farms, basket-making, and even a run at silk manufacturing. Water-powered mills sat along the brooks. It was hard country to farm and slow country to reach, and the population stayed small. Then a flood early in the twentieth century wrecked much of the mill and quarry economy, and the town began looking for a different future.
The Farm That Became Jacob’s Pillow
In 1931 the modern-dance pioneer Ted Shawn bought a worn-out hill farm in Becket and turned it into a retreat for dancers. It grew into Jacob’s Pillow, now the longest-running dance festival in the United States, with a professional school and a summer season that draws artists and audiences from around the world. In 2003 the property was named a National Historic Landmark, the only dance organization in the country to hold that distinction, after helping launch figures like Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey and Jose Limon. A town that could no longer sell granite had found something else the world wanted.
The Town That Wired Itself
When high-speed internet reached most of Massachusetts, the private cable companies skipped the Berkshire hill towns, judging them too spread out to be worth the wire. Becket did not wait. At Town Meeting the voters authorized the town to borrow and build a fiber-optic network of its own, run through the town’s Municipal Light Plant and joined with neighboring towns through the regional WiredWest cooperative. Within a few years Becket homes were coming online over a network the town owns outright. It is the same instinct that runs through the whole history of the place: a small town deciding, in a room full of its own voters, to do the hard thing itself.
Sources: Wikipedia, Becket, Massachusetts and Jacob’s Pillow; Town of Becket 2025 Annual Town Report; Town of Becket Municipal Light Plant and WiredWest records; U.S. Census Bureau.