Stockbridge, Massachusetts
A Short History of Stockbridge
From a mission town founded for the Mohican, to the studio where Norman Rockwell painted the country back to itself, Stockbridge has spent nearly three centuries deciding its own business in a room any resident can enter.
A Town Founded as a Mission
Stockbridge was settled in 1734 and incorporated on June 22, 1739, and it began unlike almost any other town in the Commonwealth. It was laid out as a mission community for the Mohican, the people the colonists called the Stockbridge Indians, who moved to the new township along the Housatonic. The Reverend John Sergeant was its first missionary, and the theologian Jonathan Edwards later served in Stockbridge. The town took its name from Stockbridge in Hampshire, England.
Oldest Improvement Society in the Country
In 1853 a group of residents formed the Laurel Hill Association to care for the town’s public greens, trees and walking paths. It is the oldest village improvement society in the United States, and it still maintains town trails and open spaces, including the reservation at Laura’s Tower and the Ice Glen. It is a piece of civic history you can walk through, and it started the way most things here start: a room full of neighbors deciding to do something together.
The Painter of Main Street
Norman Rockwell lived and worked in Stockbridge for the last quarter century of his life, and he painted the town’s own Main Street, its faces and its December light. The Norman Rockwell Museum, which holds the world’s largest collection of his original art, is in Stockbridge, and it is why many people first learn the town’s name. The picture the town keeps of itself, though, is the one that plays out every May, when residents gather to vote the budget in person.
Gardens, an Inn, and a Summer of Music
Stockbridge grew into one of the Berkshires’ great summer places without losing its town-meeting core. The Red Lion Inn has anchored Main Street since the eighteenth century. Naumkeag, the 1886 estate of the Choate family, keeps its terraced gardens open to the public through the Trustees of Reservations. And along the town’s eastern edge sits part of the grounds of Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose music carries across the hills every July and August.
Sources: Wikipedia, Stockbridge, Massachusetts; the Laurel Hill Association; the Norman Rockwell Museum; U.S. Census Bureau.