Tyringham, Massachusetts
A Short History of Tyringham
From a mill town that made the best paper in the country, to a Shaker village on Jerusalem Road, to a studio shaped like a gingerbread house, all in one narrow Berkshire valley named for a woman.
Named for a Woman
Tyringham was formally incorporated in 1762, and Governor Francis Bernard chose the name to honor a wealthy cousin, Jane Tyringham, who had just left him an estate. That makes it the only town in Massachusetts named for a woman, and there is no other place in the entire United States called Tyringham. The town has kept the same face-to-face form of government, open Town Meeting, from that year to this one.
The Best Paper in the Country
In its early years the town lived on farming and small industry: cider mills, rope factories, and paper mills packed into the valley. Tyringham had the first Fourdrinier paper machine, and its paper was said to be the best made in the country. The town stayed a busy little mill town until the 1840s, when the railroad reached the neighboring town of Lee and the businesses moved to follow it. What was left behind was the quiet farming valley you can still see today.
The Shakers on Jerusalem Road
Around 1780 a community of Shakers settled on Jerusalem Road in Tyringham and built a village there. The community closed in 1874, but many of its buildings survived, and today they are privately owned homes. One of the last of the old industries was the M.W. Stedman Rake Shop on Main Road, which every year presented a rake to the President of the United States.
The Valley as a Retreat
For more than a century this valley has drawn writers, musicians, and artists looking for quiet. Mark Twain stayed here, and so, much later, did Governor Michael Dukakis. The sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson built a fairy-tale studio in Tyringham with a rolling, thatched-looking roof, and it is known to this day as Santarella, the Tyringham Gingerbread House. President Grover Cleveland loved to fish in Hop Brook and Goose Pond, and the story the town still tells is that he was once fined two dollars for catching too many.
The School That Closed
In 1877 about one hundred schoolchildren attended the town’s five rural schoolhouses. A hundred years later only five children attended the one surviving schoolhouse in the center of the village. In 1977 that school closed, and the old schoolhouse now serves the town as office space. Since then Tyringham has sent its students to the Lee Public Schools under a tuition agreement, and the two towns share a Superintendency Union. It is why Tyringham elects a School Committee but runs no school building of its own.
The Town Today
Tyringham has no stores, restaurants, or banks, and no public transportation. It runs its own Community Post Office and a transfer station, and its fire protection comes from the volunteer Tyringham Volunteer Fire Company. The Tyringham Union Church stands on Main Road, and the Sisters of the Visitation keep a monastery on Beach Road. For a town of about four hundred people, a surprising amount still happens in one valley, and almost all of it is decided in one room each May.
Sources: Town of Tyringham, official History and About the Town (tyringham-ma.gov); U.S. Census Bureau.