Hancock, Massachusetts
A Short History of Hancock
From the Plantation of Jericho on the New York line, to a Shaker village famous for a round stone barn, to a valley town that still runs its own school and its own open Town Meeting.
Jericho, Then Hancock
Hancock was first settled in 1762 as the Plantation of Jericho, a long strip of valley land squeezed between the Taconic Mountains and the New York border in the far northwest corner of Massachusetts. In 1776, the year of the Declaration, the plantation was officially incorporated as a town and renamed for John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It has been part of Berkshire County ever since.
The Shakers and the Round Stone Barn
Around 1780 some Hancock families converted to the teachings of the Shakers, a religious order that lived communally, kept to pacifism and celibacy, and worshiped through song and an ecstatic dance that earned them the name Shaking Quakers. By 1790 believers in Hancock and Pittsfield had gathered into Hancock Shaker Village, a settlement they called the City of Peace, renowned to this day for its plain architecture and furniture and above all for its Round Stone Barn, built in 1826. In 1959 the last Shakers here sold the property to a non-profit that runs it as a living-history museum, and Hancock residents can still visit with proof of residency.
The Town the Bell System Missed
Hancock is one of only three towns in Massachusetts whose local telephone service was never provided by the old Bell System. It is served instead by the Taconic Telephone Corporation, whose other exchanges all sit across the line in New York. The other two are Richmond, its neighbor in Berkshire County, and Granby in Hampshire County. It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that comes from being a town that faces west into New York as much as east into the rest of the Commonwealth.
The Least Crowded Town in the County
Hancock spreads about 757 people across 35.7 square miles of valley and mountain, which makes it the least densely populated town in Berkshire County. The Taconic range walls the town on both sides: to the west stand Misery Mountain, whose summit at 2,671 feet is the town’s highest point, and to the northeast rises Jiminy Peak, home to the ski resort of the same name. Near the summit of Berry Hill, in the part of Pittsfield State Forest that reaches into southern Hancock, sits Berry Pond, the highest natural water body in Massachusetts at over 2,070 feet.
A Town That Keeps Its Own School
For all its size, Hancock has kept the machinery of a self-governing town. It still runs its own Hancock Elementary School rather than folding into a regional district, and it pays tuition to send its older students out to Mount Greylock, Richmond, McCann Technical, and across the border to New Lebanon. Its budget is still voted in one room at open Town Meeting, and its executive is still the three neighbors the voters elect to the Board of Selectmen. In a town this small, the government is not a distant building; it is the people at the next table.
Sources: Wikipedia, Hancock, Massachusetts; Hancock Shaker Village (hancockshakervillage.org); Town of Hancock FY2025 Annual Report; U.S. Census Bureau.