Pittsfield, Massachusetts
A Short History of Pittsfield
From Mohican homeland, to the town where the word baseball was first written down, to a General Electric city now cleaning the river GE left behind.
Before the City
Long before any town existed, the land along the Housatonic was home to the Mohican people, also known as the Stockbridge-Munsee, who hunted, fished, and farmed the river valley. Colonists pushed into the area in the 1740s and 1750s, and in 1761 the settlement was incorporated as the town of Pittsfield, named for William Pitt, the British statesman who was popular in the colonies. The Mohican community was steadily displaced, a loss that sits underneath everything that came after.
The First Written Baseball
In 1791 Pittsfield passed a bylaw to protect the windows of its new meeting house. To do it, the town forbade anyone from playing baseball within eighty yards of the building. That bylaw is the earliest known written use of the word baseball anywhere in America, decades before the game was supposedly invented elsewhere. The original document still survives, and it puts the word, in plain ink, in Pittsfield.
Melville at Arrowhead
In 1850 Herman Melville bought a farmhouse on the south side of Pittsfield and named it Arrowhead. From his study window he could see Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts, and some say its long whale-like ridge helped shape the book he was writing. That book was Moby-Dick, published in 1851. Arrowhead still stands and is open as a museum, and the Berkshire Athenaeum downtown keeps a room devoted to Melville.
Electricity and General Electric
In the 1880s the inventor William Stanley demonstrated a working alternating-current transformer in the Berkshires, proving that electricity could be sent over long distances. His Pittsfield electrical works grew quickly, and around 1903 it was absorbed by General Electric. For most of the twentieth century GE was Pittsfield. Its transformer and later plastics operations employed many thousands of people at their peak and built much of the city’s middle class. When you walk North Street, you are walking through a city that GE money built.
The Departure and the River
Late in the twentieth century General Electric downsized and pulled out, costing thousands of jobs and leaving a hole the city is still climbing out of. GE also left PCBs, toxic chemicals, in the Housatonic River, and the cleanup is still under way as a federal project decades later. Modern Pittsfield has rebuilt around other things: the arts, with Barrington Stage Company, the Berkshire Museum, and the restored Colonial Theatre; health care, anchored by Berkshire Health Systems; and a downtown along North Street that the city keeps working to fill.
Pittsfield Today
Pittsfield became a city in 1891, and today it is the largest city in the Berkshires and the seat of Berkshire County, the place where the region’s courts, hospital, and county business sit. It is a smaller city than it was at the GE peak, and an older one, but it is also the cultural and economic anchor of Western Massachusetts, the city the rest of the county looks to.
Sources: City of Pittsfield; The Berkshire Eagle; U.S. Census Bureau.