Arrowhead – the Home of Herman Melville and the Berkshire Historical Society
Herman Melville finished Moby Dick at Arrrowhead, his farm on Holmes Road. He lived here from 1850 to 1862 and befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne during these fecund years for literary development in the Lenox area.
Both the original 1850 station on this site and the current 1903 building were destinations for the wealthy New Yorkers coming to Lenox to visit their “cottages” during the Gilded Age. The station includes exhibits about the history of rail road travel to the Berkshires.
Daniel Chester French maintained a lovely summer home and studio in Stockbridge, MA. This famous sculptor’s works included the Lincoln statue for the Washington Memorial
The home of American abstract artists, George L.K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen is on a 46 acre estate near Tanglewood and includes their extensive collection of American and European cubist art.
Edith Wharton called The Mount her “first real home,” and designed both the house and the magnificent gardens according to her published writings on The Decoration of Houses. Of course she was best known for her fiction including The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.
Designed by McKim, Mead and White, Naumkeag served as a typical magnificent summer home for the New York lawyer Joseph Choate. His daughter Mabel worked for 30 years on the accompanying gardens.
George and Sarah Morgan (she the sister of the famous J.P. Morgan) purchased the Ventfort Hall property in 1891 and had Rotch and Tilden design the Jacobean revival home that so typifies the Gilded Age.