The Berkshires: Coach Inns to Cottages

By Carole Owens

Book Overview

A beautiful vacation destination today, the Berkshires has been the chosen enclave for many influential and artistic notables since the 18th century.

Those hustling to find lodging in the Berkshires today may not know they are repeating a two-hundred fifty- year-old ritual. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the Berkshires played host to some of the most fascinating characters in American literature, politics, business, and the arts. They came with the warm breezes and left when they felt the first cold snap in the autumnal air. The Berkshires: Coach Inns to Cottages is a photographic record of Berkshire dwelling places from the rough simplicity of stagecoach inns to the glittering luxury of Gilded Age cottages. Come inside the Berkshire coach inns where one might be subjected to disagreeable exposures, as Timothy Dwight noted in 1823. Come inside the Berkshire cottages where the rich and powerful were entertained according to the precepts of fashionable society. Use this volume as a guide to the many structures that have been preserved.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0738536601
• ISBN13: 9780738536606
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing (SC)
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Instructive, enlightening, intoxicating - just like the Berkshires themselves

Too often, people dismiss the Berkshires as the "Berzerkshires" - a place inhabited by the kinds of folksy degenerates who populated the artworks of the great Norman Rockwell, arguably the Michelangelo of his time. As Ms. Owens points out in her magnum opus, nothing could be further from the truth. The Berkshires are not merely the petri dish of the grotesque - they are also the locus of many random cottages, scattered hither & thither across the landscape, which it behooves any self-respecting human to visit, nay to study in depth. Yes, you will visit the Berkshires for the inbreeding & the unsolved homicides, but you will stay for the COTTAGES. Huzzah!