“ For three weeks I drove every day 7 miles and back through a lovely hill country in richest livery of summer.”

…..From “Central Berkshires” by George Blatchford (Thank you Cornelia Gilder) quoting Constance Cary Harrison re driving back and forth to Pittsfield in 1898 to visit her son recovering from appendicitis.  The 1901 photo reflects what her drive on today’s Route 7 would have been like.

The area of Lenox (roughly from the DPW north to Dan Fox Drive and from Lenox Mountain to the Housatonic East-West) that would have remained rural and agricultural the longest is today the most altered.

In this series of posts we will try to reimagine the area now heavily commercial along Route 7 as well as the turn of the century bustle of what is now residential New Lenox.

Here is a (thank you Cornelia Gilder and the late Judy Conklin Peters)annotated map of the area to be “re-envisioned.”