Lenox was a prosperous farming and mill town — the seat of Berkshire County — that was suddenly "discovered" by famous and wealthy residents of Boston and New York in the mid 1800s.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote "The House of Seven Gables" while living in a little red cottage just outside of town (the cottage actually is in Stockbridge, but Hawthorne thought he lived in Lenox because its village center was much closer). Hawthorne’s series of children’s stories, "Tanglewood Tales," provided the name for a neighboring estate.
A recreation of Hawthorne’s cottage, near Tanglewood, is open for tours in the summer.
In 1845, Samuel Gray Ward, the Boston banker who later was to finance the U.S. purchase of Alaska, built a summer home near Hawthorne’s cottage. Ward told his friends back in Boston about the beautiful Berkshire countryside and the mild summer weather. Soon, many of them were joining him as summer, or even year-round residents. Among the early "summer people" was Fanny Kemble, one of the most noted Shakespearean actresses of the day.
By the late 1800s, Lenox and Stockbridge were booming as the summer homes of many of the country’s elite. The peak building year in Lenox was 1885, when construction began on several of the gigantic mansions these wealthy families whimsically called "cottages."
The most magnificent of them all was Shadowbrook, built for railroad baron Anson Phelps Stokes on 900 acres at the edge of Lenox and Stockbridge. With 100 rooms, it was one of the largest homes in North America. Andrew Carnegie later bought the house, and died there in 1919.
The Guilded Age ended in the early twentieth century, when the income tax and other factors made it impossible for the "cottagers" to maintain their huge summer homes in the Berkshires. Several of the cottages have been converted to hotels or schools.
One of the grandest cottages in Lenox is open for public tours: The Mount, built by novelist Edith Wharton. The Mount is now undergoing a restoration to bring it back to its former grandeur.
A new era for Lenox and the Berkshires began in the 1930s, when music lovers began sponsoring symphonic concerts in the summer months. In 1937, the Boston Symphony Orchestra began offering concerts at its new summer home, the "Tanglewood" estate between Lenox and Stockbridge. A year later, the orchestra inaugurated its huge new concert hall, the "Shed."
In the succeeding six decades, Tanglewood has become famous as one of the world’s leading music festivals, attracting more than 300,000 listeners each summer. Other summer arts festivals, featuring theater, music and modern dance, have joined in making the Berkshires the summer cultural capital of the Northeast United States.
