The story behind the creation of the book, Marking Stockbridge’s Past
The story behind the creation of the book, Marking Stockbridge’s Past.
By Maria L. Carr
I published the book, Marking Stockbridge’s Past, in 2023. As a life-long resident of the town of Stockbridge I find its history extremely interesting and extensive. After I retired in 1999, I spent time enjoying my gardens, doing volunteer work, and research. I enjoy doing genealogy research and have served as the Historian for The Baker Family Association since 2003, where I’ve compiled an extensive genealogy of the Baker family. Local history, especially the history of the Interlaken portion of the town of Stockbridge, has always interested me. That interest is what led me to creating Marking Stockbridge’s Past.
During my time as a volunteer at the Museum & Archives at the Stockbridge Library I was asked to be on an Advisory Committee and at one of our meetings, Barbara Allen who was Curator at the time, asked for our input of what else the M&A should be doing. I suggested a newsletter. So as of March 2009, I became editor of the M&A’s bimonthly e-newsletter, “Now & Then”, that was put out from 2009 to 2020 (72 issues/12 years). The newsletter covered the M&A’s exhibits, recent acquisitions, programs, and anything else that was happening at the M&A. Additionally, I usually included an article about something or somebody within the town, some of which happened to be articles on monuments, markers, and plaques. This is where the idea for this book started to germinate back then. I thought that it would be nice to group those articles along with information and pictures on other monuments, memorials, and plaques that were in the town. At that point I thought it would make a nice booklet of some kind.
So I made a list (you always have to have a list) which must have contained about 30 items. When I would be in Stockbridge I would stop and photograph something on my list and then do research on them. As I did research for the newsletter or talked with people about my project, I would learn or come across information on others in the town. As an example when I was looking up information on Alva Gray for the plaque at the Children’s Chime Tower, I found a newspaper article about him that mentioned that Austin Riggs had put a plaque on their greenhouse for him. The project had a habit of mushrooming and the list grew and became an Excel spreadsheet with columns for photographing, researching, and writing.
Someplace in the spring of 2011, I learned about the benches in Bowker’s Woods on Glendale Middle Road which had plaques on them. As I was unfamiliar with Bowker’s Woods, I decided to contact Helen Pigott who lived near there and was always a trove of information on anything Stockbridge. I explained what I was trying to do and asked if she would have time to show me where the benches were located. It’s good that I did as the property was in two parts with the railroad splitting it in half. The trail went down to the railroad tracks where there’s a right of way for crossing the tracks. The railroad had piled railroad ties at that point which made it difficult to find the exact crossing, plus there are several trails and it was much easier having someone familiar with the area with me. Helen was more than happy to show me the way. When I had explained to her what I was trying to do, she said that she had started a similar project at one time, but she hadn’t worked on it for quite a while. She was taking pictures with her camera and developing them. Then she planned on typing a page on her typewriter for each one describing what it was and where it was located. She then planned to attach the picture she had taken to the typed page. Her goal was to eventually take her completed pages someplace like Staples and have them copied but she hadn’t gotten very far with the project.
So Helen and I teamed up in 2011 and, weather permitting, would go out and “explore” (photograph) at least once a week, if not more often, with Helen doing her project her way and me doing mine my way. I was loading my photos from my camera into my computer and using WORD to create a document about each one inserting the pictures into the document. This allowed me to crop the pictures and insert them wherever I liked within the document. When I wasn’t working (more like playing) on the project with Helen I would spend time researching what I’d photographed so I could do a paragraph about each one with its history.
In 2012, my good friend and retired school teacher, Joyce Hovey, very kindly offered to be my proof reader for the project. After completing a group of pages, I would print them and Joyce would correct my punctuation and grammar (just like being back in school). She would give them back to me, marked with a red pencil, and I would update my WORD documents. I wish she were able to see this project completed. She passed away shortly before it was published. She was a godsend. When one of the pages came back with no corrections, it was like getting an A+.
Shortly after that, Barbara Allen, joined my “staff” of helpers. After Joyce completed going over the pages, I would pass them on to Barbara for her to look over. My Excel spreadsheet now had more columns entitled “Joyce”, “Barbara” and “completed” and the list grew larger.
There were many problems encountered during this undertaking. Some were that the plaque or marker was so worn making it very hard to read which made it even harder to photograph. Photographing on a cloudy day was best because glare off the plaque was always a problem. The location could also be a problem – a couple of the windows in St. Paul’s church were extremely high up and, even with the zoom on my camera, they were hard to photograph. Also the lighting was a deterrent in some cases. Sometimes, I would have to photograph things several times because I didn’t like the picture I took or as in some cases, they were moved – i.e. the benches with plaques at the Unicorn Theatre and the Botanical Gardens which kept being positioned in different places each year. I finally inserted a notation that they may not be in the same spot each season. Because this took many years to complete, I also had to keep up with anything new that was being installed which was significant.
Helen and I had many adventures – climbing mountains, going up into bell towers, scrubbing rocks of moss & lichen, removing leaves and debris that had covered part of an inscription, etc. We walked across the railroad trestle bridge which crossed the Housatonic River (approximately across from Dugway Road) to photograph the benchmark in the bridge abutment on the other side which was quite scarry because of the openings between the boards and the height, not to mention the possibility of a train coming.
Several plaques were quite elusive to locate. The Hill Water Company plaque was one that took us three trips to locate. The first trip we parked along the road and tried to find an access road or path of some kind into where the spring house should be located, but failed. On our second trip, we asked directions at a house nearby and were able to find the access. Unfortunately, we missed the turning to the spring house and ended up on the ridge of Rattlesnake Mountain looking out onto the other side towards Route 7 (beautiful view). Then finally, on our third trip we found the correct turn in the woods and located the spring house with the plaque on it. Another hard-to-find plaque was the Burgoyne Pass plaque. A friend had told me that he remembered seeing a plaque on a boulder when he was a kid playing in the woods on Beartown Mountain. I uncovered a newspaper clipping at the M&A about a dedication ceremony by the DAR of the plaque with a picture of the plaque attached to a large boulder. So one extremely hot summer day, Helen and I decided that we would photograph the entrance boulder for Ice Glen. I had taken a picture earlier that year, but as it was covered with moss and lichen you couldn’t make out the inscription on the boulder in the picture. Helen had brought a small bucket with water and a wire brush so we could clean the face of the boulder before we photographed it. When we finished, I suggested that if we continued up to Laura’s Tower we could go down the other side and look for the Burgoyne Pass plaque. Once past Laura’s Tower and starting down the other side the path completely disappeared and we had to go by basic direction. We ended up behind Finnerty’s house on Ice Glen Road but couldn’t find any boulder large enough to be the one in the newspaper clipping. So Helen (with me in tow) marched up to the front door and knocked (bucket and brush and dirty water in hand) and explained what we were doing and if they could possibly direct us. Because it was so hot, they very kindly asked us in, gave us glasses of ice water, and then explained how to go. Evidently, they usually mowed a path over to the boulder, but hadn’t done it yet that year. After several mis-directions and wading through goldenrod taller than we were, we found the small bridge and the path that led to the boulder with the plaque. Mission accomplished, but then we had to retrace our steps back through the goldenrod and woods behind the house and back up over the mountain to Laura’s Tower and down the other side where our car was parked. Fortunately, I have a good sense of direction. This is the kind of thing that I would never have done on my own.
Another interesting story is when Helen and I photographed at Tanglewood in August of 2011. I had a copy of a two-page document that I found in the files at the M&A that listed quite a few of the plaques as our guide. We went up one afternoon and photographed what we could find which included some not on the list, but there were several on the list that we could not find. After searching for quite a while, Helen was able to track down someone in the maintenance department that she knew and asked him about them. Fortunately, he knew exactly where they were. When they tore down the backstage pavilion in 1980 and rebuilt it, they put the plaques in storage in a closet in the office area. He very kindly, not only showed us where they were, but took each plaque out and let each one of us photograph them (they were very large and extremely heavy). As a side note – several years later in 2013, Tanglewood was planning an exhibit for their 75th Anniversary of the Serge Koussevitzky Music Shed and had asked Barbara Allen, curator at the M&A, for the loan of the model of the Tanglewood Shed, which is part of the M&A collection, for their exhibit. When I was in the M&A one day, Barbara told me about it, and that she had told Tanglewood that if Shirley Miller and her sister, daughters of Joseph Franz the creator of the model, agreed they could have it on loan. She further told me that Shirley and her sister had told her that if Tanglewood would put back up the plaque for their father that had been taken down, then they would agree. Barbara explained that the problem was that no one knew what happened to the plaque. I said, guess what, I know exactly where it is. As it turned out it was one of the plaques in the back of the closet that Helen and I had photographed.
During the time of working on this project, I discovered many things about the town of Stockbridge that I didn’t know. I had never heard of preamble markers, but Helen had from her time spent working at town offices. An early Massachusetts Law which I believe is still in existence, states that every town must establish and mark its boundaries and periodically review those marks. The town’s selectmen would officially appoint persons to go out and “perambulate” the bounds and record what they found. Unfortunately, nothing could be found at town offices about the preamble markers. That didn’t deter Helen. She knew that James Thomas had done an Eagle Scout project on the Preamble Markers in the town in 1975. Helen contacted James’ mother, whom she knew, and got his address. She then wrote him a letter and was able to get a copy of his Eagle Scout documentation which we then used as a guide to locate many of them. We did find a couple markers that were not in his Eagle Scout project. One on Old Stockbridge Road which was in the middle of a very large forsythia bush that we had to climb inside of to photograph. I located another not on his list thanks to Gary Leveille, who came across it on the west (Housatonic) side of Monument Mountain while hiking and passed the information along to me.
Sadly, Helen was diagnosed with cancer, but we continued to work on the project when she was up to it. In 2013, one of the preamble markers that Helen and I tried to find on the Lee side of Beartown Mountain proved unsuccessful. We searched for over an hour and couldn’t find it. In telling a couple of my friends about the elusive marker, they offered to help me look for it. It took us quite a while, but we did locate the marker. The following week I showed Helen where it was and she was able to take some pictures. Unfortunately, this was the last time that I went out with Helen. My friends did help me locate several other of the more elusive preamble markers that were on mountains.
There was also the case of uncovering information about plaques but not being able to locate them. There were two different ones that I asked Pat Flinn, who was a member of the Laurel Hill Association, about. One was the Sedgwick Seat, a small seat carved out of a rock with an inscription on it located near the rostrum on Laurel Hill Park, mentioned in the Laurel Hill Book which I asked Pat if she knew anything about. She didn’t at the time, but when working on Laurel Hill cleaning up, she uncovered it. It had been covered with leaves and debris. The other was the Sedgwick Reservation boulder with an inscription which I found mentioned in the Laurel Hill Association’s minutes of 1933 which was supposed to be on the north side of the path leading up to Laura’s Tower. Sometime after asking Pat about it, she happened to be at the Library when someone came in and was asking about the boulder with an inscription on it that he had come across in the woods on Beartown Mountain. Evidently in 2000 the trail to Laura’s Tower had been straightened out and no longer went by the boulder, and it became forgotten over time. Mystery solved and Laurel Hill Association now has a cleared path over to the boulder.
Creating this book was an interesting experience as well as fun. Unfortunately, life goes on and new plaques are put up or existing monuments are revamped. We have lost some over the years; but hopefully we won’t lose any more.
Many people helped me with this book. I couldn’t have done it without them. Joyce and Barbara were enormous help in reviewing what I had written. I owe the most to Helen who spent many hours photographing with me and helping me locate things.