Great Barrington, Massachusetts
A Short History of Great Barrington
A town that set itself off from Sheffield in 1761, the birthplace of W.E.B. Du Bois, and the first place on earth where alternating current lit a Main Street.
1761, and the Parish That Became a Town
Great Barrington did not begin as a town. It began as the north parish of Sheffield in the Housatonic valley, settled far enough from the parent town’s meetinghouse that by 1742 it was set apart as its own parish. In 1761 it was incorporated as the Town of Great Barrington, taking its name from Great Barrington in Gloucestershire, England. That is the pattern for much of Massachusetts: a town is usually a piece of an older town that grew big enough to want its own vote, and Great Barrington got its vote almost thirty years before the town whose parish it had been finished separating from it.
The Town That Lit Its Own Main Street
In March 1886, an engineer named William Stanley Jr. ran a generator in a former rubber mill on Cottage Street and sent its current down Great Barrington’s Main Street, lighting up the shops there. It was the world’s first practical demonstration that alternating current could be sent a distance and then stepped down safely for everyday use, the idea that made the modern power grid possible. The experiment that changed how the whole world gets its electricity happened on the street you can still walk down, and the town has never let anyone forget it.
The Boy From Church Street
W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, historian and civil rights leader, was born in Great Barrington in 1868 and grew up here before going on to Fisk University and Harvard, where he became the first African American to earn a doctorate, and then to a lifetime of writing that reshaped how the country understands itself. The town keeps his childhood ground as the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite, a reminder that a small Berkshire town produced a mind that argued with a nation.
Mills, the River, and What Stayed
For most of two centuries Great Barrington ran on the Housatonic River and the mills and farms along it, and the village of Housatonic north of the center grew up around that industry. The mills faded, but the town they built stayed, and today Great Barrington anchors the southern Berkshires as a market and cultural town, with the same river still running through the middle of it.
The Landmarks the Town Keeps
Great Barrington’s landmarks tell its story as plainly as its records do: Monument Mountain, whose summit trail brought Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville together on a hike in 1850; the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center downtown; and Searles Castle, the Gilded Age mansion on Main Street. They are the places a resident points to when asked what the town is, and every one of them is open ground for a student who wants to understand where they live.
Sources: Wikipedia, Great Barrington, Massachusetts; Town of Great Barrington (townofgbma.gov); U.S. Census Bureau.