Great Barrington is a New England town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 7,527 at the 2000 census. Both a summer resort and home to Ski Butternut, Great Barrington includes the villages of Van Deusenville and Housatonic, Massachusetts.

History

The Mahican Indigenous peoples of the Americas called the area Mahaiwe, meaning'the place downstream. 'It lay on the New England Path, which connected Fort Orange near Albany, New York with Springfield and then Massachusetts Bay. The village was first settled in 1726, and from...

Great Barrington is a New England town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 7,527 at the 2000 census. Both a summer resort and home to Ski Butternut, Great Barrington includes the villages of Van Deusenville and Housatonic, Massachusetts.

History

The Mahican Indigenous peoples of the Americas called the area Mahaiwe, meaning'the place downstream. 'It lay on the New England Path, which connected Fort Orange near Albany, New York with Springfield and then Massachusetts Bay. The village was first settled in 1726, and from 1742-1761 was the north parish of Sheffield, Massachusetts. In 1761, it was officially incorporated as Great Barrington, named after the village of Great Barrington, Gloucestershire in Gloucestershire, England.

In the winter of 1776 Henry Knox passed through Great Barrington while transporting the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to the Siege of Boston.

With the arrival of the railroad, Great Barrington developed into a Gilded Age resort community for those seeking relief from the heat and pollution of cities. Wealthy families built grand homes called Berkshire Cottages here, as others would in Lenox, Massachusetts and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Estates included Searles Castle (Massachusetts), commissioned in 1888 by the widow of Mark Hopkins together with her second husband, Edward Francis Searles, and Brookside, built for William Hall Walker. In 1895, Colonel William L. Brown, part owner of the New York Daily News, presented Great Barrington with a statue of a newsboy, now a landmark on the western edge of town.

In March 1886, the water mill at Great Barrington was the site of an experiment that first used water to drive an alternating current generator. A transformer was used to increase the voltage and the current was transmitted over a mile away to the nearest town to power street lights. It was the first time electrical power had been transmitted a considerable distance away from its generating station.