It was at this modest Pittsfield farmhouse named Arrowhead that Herman Melville wrote his epic 1851 novel Moby Dick .
For nearly 175 years, the Berkshires has enchanted artists and writers who took up residence there, including not only Rockwell but also noted landscape painters Thomas Cole and George Inness and legendary novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edith Wharton. It was in 1851, in the cramped, book-lined study of his modest mustard-yellow farmhouse called Arrowhead near Pittsfield, that Melville wrote Moby Dick , an American literary classic and arguably the greatest seafaring novel ever published. Faithfully restored and open to the public, Arrowhead invites visitors to gather in the very room where Melville composed his opus, with a clear view beyond of Mount Greylock—at 3,491 feet, the highest elevation in Massachusetts. It is said that Melville saw, in the brooding mass of wintry Greylock, the form of a giant white whale emerging from a roiling, white-capped ocean. In Lenox, only a dozen miles south of Arrowhead, stands The Mount, a lavish 113-acre estate overlooking Laurel Lake where in 1905 Edith Wharton completed her best-selling masterpiece, The House of Mirth . Pursuing her interests in architecture and horticulture, Wharton
Norman Rockwell’s Stockbridge studio was disassembled and moved to the site of the Norman Rockwell Museum in 1986.
Bountiful Berkshires Story by Dave G. Houser
My introduction to the Berkshires—a swath of low mountains, meadows, forests, swirling streams, and small towns on the far western edge of Massachusetts— came as a youngster in the 1950s. It was not by way of a visit there, but from the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, illustrated by Norman Rockwell. Generally considered to be one of America’s most important artists/ illustrators, Rockwell spent the waning years of his five-decade-long career in Stockbridge, a leafy village in the heart of the Berkshires. His sentimental portrayals of everyday life there frequented Post covers from 1953 to 1963. Today, the largest collection of his work—678 paintings and drawings—hangs in the Normal Rockwell Museum on the western outskirts of Stockbridge. Visitors can also look in on Rockwell’s tidy studio. It was moved from its original location in town to the museum grounds in 1986.
BERKSHIRES
COAST TO COAST SUMMER MAGAZINE 2018
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