Lanesborough, Massachusetts
A Short History of Lanesborough
From a frontier grant called New Framingham, to a Berkshire town named for an Irish countess, to the doorway of the highest mountain in Massachusetts.
New Framingham on the Frontier
Lanesborough was first settled in 1753, which makes it one of the earliest communities in Berkshire County, back when this corner of the Commonwealth was the western edge of English settlement. The first plantation carried the plain name New Framingham. For more than a decade it grew without a charter of its own, a scattering of farms in the hills above what would become Pittsfield.
1765, and a Countess’s Name
On January 21, 1765, New Framingham was incorporated as a town and given a new name: Lanesborough, in honor of the Countess of Lanesborough, a friend of Governor Francis Bernard, who signed the act. It is a small piece of colonial politics fixed permanently to a map of the Berkshires, and it is why a hill town in western Massachusetts carries the name of a place in Ireland that almost none of its residents have ever seen.
The Old Stone School
In 1832 a resident named Ephraim Bradley gave the town the money to build a schoolhouse of stone, and the Old Stone School taught Lanesborough’s children until 1950. It still stands, a reminder that the town educated its own long before a regional district existed.
The Trolley and the Pleasure Park
Around 1900, when electric streetcar lines threaded through the Berkshires, Lanesborough became the home of the Berkshire Pleasure Park, a trolley park where city residents rode out on the streetcar for a day at the lake and the amusements. It was part of a pattern that shaped the whole county in those years, when the streetcar briefly made the mountains and the water reachable for an afternoon.
The Mountain at the Town’s Door
Lanesborough sits at the foot of Mount Greylock, the highest summit in Massachusetts, and the way up begins here: the summit auto road and the Mount Greylock Visitor Center both start in Lanesborough. Pontoosuc Lake spreads along the town’s southern edge, a large section of Pittsfield State Forest with the poised boulder called Balance Rock lies within its bounds, and the summit of the Jiminy Peak resort rises on the town’s western side. For a small town, Lanesborough holds an outsized share of the northern Berkshire landscape.
One District, Two Towns
The town’s most recent turning point came at the ballot box. In November 2017 Lanesborough voters agreed to fold their own elementary school into the Mount Greylock Regional School District, joining the high school and the elementary schools under one committee. The measure only took effect because Williamstown approved it the same night, and Lanesborough insisted on a protection written into the agreement: neither town’s elementary school can be closed unless both towns consent. It is a modern example of the oldest form of power in the town, a room of voters settling something that shapes the next generation.
Sources: Wikipedia, Lanesborough, Massachusetts; Housatonic Heritage (Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area); Mount Greylock Regional School District; U.S. Census Bureau.