THE BERKSHIRE WEEKEND

The Berkshire Weekend is two nights away in the hills of western Massachusetts in early September: fishing or walking through the day, a long table at night, and no one asked what they do for a living.

It exists so that members spend two days out of doors and two evenings at one table, among people who do not ask what anyone does.

The Cottages

The Berkshires are the highlands of western Massachusetts and northwestern Connecticut, some ninety-eight miles from north to south, generally taken to be the hills between the Housatonic and Connecticut rivers. Sir Francis Bernard, the royal governor from 1760 to 1769, named them after his home county in England. Mount Greylock, at 3,491 feet, is the highest point, and Bash Bish Falls is the tallest waterfall in Massachusetts.

The writers came first. The actress Fanny Kemble visited early in the nineteenth century, and Nathaniel Hawthorne came from Salem in 1850 and stayed a year and a half. On 5 August 1850 he and Herman Melville climbed Monument Mountain, above Great Barrington, for a picnic. A thunderstorm drove them into a cave, where they talked at length, and the talk, by one account, gave Melville ideas for his new book, Moby-Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne.

Then came the money. From 1880 to 1920, the Berkshire Cottage era, Lenox became a Gilded Age resort in the manner of Newport and Bar Harbor, and some seventy-six estates were built in Lenox and Stockbridge. A cottage was “a summer residence (often on a large and sumptuous scale)”. In 1903 an acre in Lenox cost $20,000, when an acre in the towns nearby cost a few dollars.

Edith Wharton designed The Mount, above Laurel Lake, with Ogden Codman Jr. and Francis L. V. Hoppin, and Beatrix Farrand laid out the grounds; it was built from July 1901 to the autumn of 1902. “There for ten years I lived and gardened and wrote contentedly,” Wharton wrote. At Naumkeag, in Stockbridge, Stanford White built forty-four rooms in the Shingle Style for Joseph Hodges Choate, ambassador in London from 1899 to 1905, and Fletcher Steele later made its gardens, among them the Blue Steps, in 1938.

The federal income tax of 1913 ended the building. Shadowbrook was sold by Carnegie’s widow in 1922, and in 1937 Tanglewood, the Tappan family’s estate, became the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The Weekend

Two nights in the hills, with the days given to fishing or walking, as each member chooses, and a long table at night.

The river is the Housatonic, which rises at Pittsfield; its Mohican name is given as “beyond the mountain place”. Two stretches are kept for catch and release, one below the Route 20 bridge at Lee and one below the Glendale Dam at Stockbridge. They are fished with artificial lures only, every fish goes back, and the state stocks them with brown trout each spring. The summer closures near the cold tributaries end with August.

The walks are the hills themselves. Monument Mountain is the one Hawthorne and Melville climbed. Mount Greylock has routes to a summit that looks over Massachusetts, Vermont and New York, and free guided heritage walks are given on Saturdays and Sundays through September and October.

In early September the colour has not yet come. It begins on the high ground and in the north, from late September.

What Is Asked

Country attire. Nothing is published for a weekend in the hills, and the Court dresses to the register of the river and the hill.

Nobody is asked what they do for a living.

On the river, the state’s rules: artificial lures only, and every fish released. There are advisories against eating fish from the Housatonic.

Nobody is pitched at the table.

The Places

The number of places and the sum are stated in the invitation.

Tanglewood, at Lenox, is on the calendar from July into August.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.