Monterey, Massachusetts
A Short History of Monterey
From the sawmill a settler built on Konkapot Brook in 1739, to the day in 1847 the southern end of Tyringham broke off and named itself for a battle, this is a town that chose its own beginning.
South Tyringham
The first permanent settlers of what is now Monterey, Lieutenant Isaac Garfield, Thomas Slaton, and Captain Brewer, arrived in the spring and summer of 1739 in a stretch of the Berkshire hills then called Housatonic Township Number One, later Tyringham. Captain Brewer built the first sawmill that same year on Konkapot Brook, at the outfall of the water they called Twelve Mile Pond and we now call Lake Garfield. Over the next century the southern part of Tyringham grew into a village of its own, known as South Tyringham, far enough from the northern village that governing the two as one grew impractical.
A Town of Its Own, 1847
In 1847 the southern village separated from Tyringham and incorporated as a town in its own right. Choosing a name, the residents looked to recent news: they settled on Monterey, for the Battle of Monterrey fought the year before in the Mexican-American War, and passed over the alternatives Palo Alto and Buena Vista. From that year forward Monterey ran its own affairs, in the open Town Meeting form it still uses.
Henry Knox’s Cannon
In the winter of 1776, decades before the town had a name, the expedition led by Henry Knox hauling cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to the siege of Boston passed through these hills. The route across the Berkshires is marked today as the Henry Knox Trail, and its markers still stand along the roads of the south county.
The Bidwell House
On Art School Road stands the Bidwell House, a Georgian saltbox built in the 1750s as the parsonage for the district’s first settled minister. It is now a house museum set on roughly 192 acres of woods and stone walls, with trails open to the public, and it keeps the story of the town’s earliest families and their households.
Lake Garfield and the Land
Monterey wraps around Lake Garfield, the old Twelve Mile Pond, fed by Konkapot Brook. Beartown State Forest reaches into the town from the north, and the Appalachian Trail crosses the high ground to the west over the shoulder of the Berkshire ridge. Much of Monterey is still woods, water, and working land, and the town has long organized to keep it that way through its conservation commission and its committees.
Monterey Today
Monterey is a town of about 1,095 people who still govern themselves in person. The open Town Meeting that the town has held since 1847 still gathers every spring at the firehouse, where the budget and the bylaws are decided by whoever walks in, and every registered voter in town is a member of it.
Sources: Wikipedia, Monterey, Massachusetts; the Bidwell House Museum; the Town of Monterey history pages; the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth. Dates are drawn from the town’s own histories.