Lenox, Massachusetts
A Short History of Lenox
A village set off from Richmond in 1767, the county seat of Berkshire for most of a century, a Gilded Age summer resort of marble cottages, and the town that became the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
1767, and the Village That Left
Lenox did not begin as a town. It began as part of Richmond, and the ridge of hills that runs between them split the community in two. The eastern village, known as Yokuntown for an indigenous chief, grew large enough to run its own affairs, and in 1767 it was set off and incorporated as Lenox. The name was meant to honor Charles Lennox, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, but a clerk dropped a letter at incorporation, and the town has been Lenox ever since. That is the pattern for much of Massachusetts: a town is usually a piece of an older town that got big enough to want its own vote.
The County Seat, 1784 to 1868
For most of a century Lenox was the seat of Berkshire County. From 1784 the county’s courts sat here, and the courthouse built for them still stands: since 1874 it has housed the Lenox Library, which the town founded in 1856. In 1868 the county seat moved north to the larger, faster growing city of Pittsfield, and the courts went with it. Lenox kept the building, and turned it into one of the finest small public libraries in the state.
The Gilded Age Cottages
Between about 1880 and 1920, Lenox turned into a summer resort for some of the wealthiest families in the country, a Berkshire rival to Newport and Bar Harbor. They built enormous seasonal mansions and called them, without irony, cottages. In 1903 an acre in Lenox sold for twenty thousand dollars while an acre in the next town over went for a few dollars. Among the people who came was the novelist Edith Wharton, who designed and built The Mount here and wrote several of her books in it. The building of the great cottages slowed after the federal income tax arrived in 1913, but many of the houses survive, and several are open to the public today.
Tanglewood, and the Music That Stayed
In 1937 the Boston Symphony Orchestra made its summer home at Tanglewood, a former family estate that lies partly in Lenox and partly in neighboring Stockbridge. The orchestra has returned every summer since, and Tanglewood has become one of the best known music festivals in the world. It is the clearest sign of what Lenox became: a small hill town that draws artists, audiences and visitors from everywhere, while still settling its budget in a room where residents raise their hands.
1991: How the Town Runs Now
Here is the piece of Lenox history that most directly affects you. In 1991 the Legislature passed the Lenox Town Manager Act, Chapter 155 of the Acts of 1991, which set up the town’s current form of government: an elected five-member Select Board, an appointed professional Town Manager to run the departments, and an open Town Meeting that still holds the legislative power. The trade was deliberate, a board you elect plus a professional administrator it hires, and it is the kind of arrangement Town Meeting can revisit, because a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted.
Sources: Wikipedia, Lenox, Massachusetts (incorporation, county seat, Gilded Age, Tanglewood, The Mount, Lenox Library); Town of Lenox, Office of the Town Manager, on the Lenox Town Manager Act (Chapter 155 of the Acts of 1991); U.S. Census Bureau.