Resources

Research Sources

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The Lenox Library

Check the second floor reading room where you can review non-circulating Lenox histories including the George Tucker manuscript, Shiretown by David Wood and the Rev. Field history of Berkshire county.  The library has the original Lenox Non-Importation Agreement and other historic documents. Good information on the early history of the county is also available through the Stockbridge Library and the Sheffield Historical Society

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Pittsfield Library

The ground floor of the Pittsfield Library has a local history department which includes original documents and early maps of Lenox.

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The Berkshire Middle District Registry of Deeds

The middle Berkshire registry of deeds includes early land grants, proprietors holdings and minutes of early proprietors meetings in Lenox.  Working backward, prior owners of any current property in Lenox can be identified.

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The Lenox Historical Society 65 Main St., Lenox, MA

In addition to exhibits and photos about town history, members of the Historical Society can assist with research on people and events from the recent and distant past in Lenox. The Lenox Historical Society also has copies of the inventory of homes more than 75 years old within and near the downtown historic district (ask for the Form B Notebooks). The Historical Society is open Thursday-Saturday 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.

Lenox Historical Society – Facebook Page

 

Also information is available through other local historical societies (listed on the Berkshire History Network) or through the Berkshire Historical Society

Town of Lenox Burial Records 

The town of Lenox website lists burials at the Church on the Hill, New Lenox and Mountainview cemeteries.  Burial information for St. Ann’s Cemetery is available through St. Ann’s Church.

Lenox Genealogy

Most of the records on this site can only be accessed by working with the Family History Center or other resources not available online.  Many family histories can be accessed through Ancestry.com

History of Lenox

A history found on the Berkshire Web with some interesting background on the Sedgewicks in Lenox.

History of Lenox – Town Website

An excellent chronology written by John Townes.

MACRIS Listings for Lenox Buildings

Compiled by the Historical Commission, these Mass Historical Commission forms provide additional information on houses within the Lenox Historic District and nearby.  To access Lenox listings select “Lenox” from the drop down list of towns, hit “Next” then select “Buildings” from the drop down list and hit “Next.”

HD Maps

Also See Historic Buildings of MA

5 are from Lenox

 

Background Reading (alpha by author)

Allen, Thomas B., Tories, Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War, Harper Collins e-books, 2010

Anderson, Virginia Dejohn, New England’s Generation, The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1997

Bailyn, Bernard, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, Harvard University

Bailyn, Bernard, Voyagers to the West, A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, Vintage e-books, 1986

Berkin, Carol, Revolutionary Mothers, Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, Vintage Books, 2006

Berkshire Hills Conference, Inc., Federal Writers Project, The Berkshire Hills, Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York and London, 1939 (E-Edition made available by the Internet Archive)

Bernstein, R.B., The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, 2009

Borneman, Walter R., The French and Indian War, Deciding the Fate of North America, Harper Collins e-books, 2006

Breen, T.H., The Marketplace of Revolution, How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004

Buel, Joy Day and Buel, Richard Jr., The Way of Duty, A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America, W.W. Norton and Company, 1984

Chague, Jan, History of Lenox Furnace and Lenox Dale, Lenox Historical Society, 2015

Chernow, Ron, Washington, A Life, The Penguin Press, 2010

Child, Hamilton (Compiler), Gazetteer of Berkshire County, Mass., 1725-1885, Reprinted by General Books, Memphis, 2012

Church on the Hill, Centennial Anniversary of the Dedication of the Old Church on the Hill, Press of the Sun Printing Company, Pittsfield, MA 1908

Church on the Hill, The Church on the Hill, United Church of Christ, Lenox, Massachusetts, History Gathered 1769-1970.

Clark, Christopher, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860, Cornell University Press, 1990

Cushing, Thomas, History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts:  With Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men (Two Volumes), J.B. Beers Publishing Company, New York, 1885 (Reprinted by Sabin Americanna)

Dewey, Rev. Chester, History of Berkshire County, Published by Samuel W. Bush, Pittsfield, 1829

Dow, George Francis, Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Arno Press, A New York Times Company, 1977 (first published in Boston 1935)

Dunn, Susan, Dominion of Memories, Jefferson, Madison and the Decline of Virginia, Basic Books, 2007

Dunn, Susan, Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004

Earle, Alice Morse, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894 (A Public Domain Book – e-edition)

Earle, Alice Morse, Home Life in Colonial Days, The Berkshire Traveller Press, Stockbridge Massachusetts, 1898 (A Public Domain Book – e-edition)

Egleston, Thomas, The Life of John Paterson: Major General in the Revolutionary Army, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894

Evarts, Boutell, Greene, American History 1690-1740, Provincial America, 1905

Fast, Howard, The Hessian, North Castle Books, 1972 (copyright for new forward 1996)

Gable, John Allen, The Goodness That Doth Crown Our Days: A History of Trinity Parish, Lenox, Massachusetts, Lamb Printing Company, North Adams, MA, 1993

Gilder, Cornelia Brooke and Richard S. Jackson, Jr., The Lenox Club Sesquicentennial History, Troy Book Makers, 2014

Gilder, Cornelia Brooke with Peters, Julia Conklin, The Tanglewood Circle, Hawthorne’s Lenox, History Press, 2008

Gordon, John Steele, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power,  Harper Collins e-books, 2004

Greene, Evarts Boutell, American History 1690-1740, Provincial America, 1905

Gross, Robert A., The Minutemen and Their World (American Century), Hill and Wang, 1976 (ebook edition)

Holliday, Carl, Woman’s Life in Colonial Days, The Cornhill Publishing Co., The Jordan and Moore Press (e-book through Internet Archives)

Holton, Woody, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1999

Horwitz, Tony, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, Henry Holt and Company, 2008

Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought, The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press, 2007

Howe, M.A. DeWolfe, The Tale of Tanglewood Scene of the Berkshire Music Festivals, The Vanguard Press, New York, 1946

Jackson, Richard S. Jr. and Gilder, Cornelia Brooke, Houses of the Berkshires 1870-1930, Acanthus Press, New York 2006

Johnson, Claudia Durst, Daily Life in Colonial New England, Greenwood Press, 2002

Larkin, Jack, The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840, Harper Collins e.books, 1988 (e pub 2010)

Leckie, Robert, A Few Acres of Snow, The Saga of the French and Indian Wars, John Wiley & Sons, 1999

Lenox Historical Society, East Street Book – 1987, Originally Handwritten by Oliver W. Osborne (1823-1895), Lenox, MA

Leyburn, James G., The Scotch Irish, A Social History, The University of North Carolina Press, 1962

Lind, Michael, Land of Promise, An Economic History of the United States, Harper Collins 2012

Mallary, Raymond DeWitt, Lenox and the Berkshire Highlands, G.B. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1902 (Reprinted by Nabu Public Domain)

Martin, James Kirby, Ordinary Courage, The Revolutionary War Adventures of Joseph Plumb Martin, Wiley-Blackwell, Fourth Edition 2013

Middlekauff, Robert, The Glorious Cause, The American Revolution, 1763-1789, The Oxford History of the United States, Oxford University Press, 2005

Mills, Charles A., Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800, e-edition, 2012

 

Morris, Charles R., The Dawn of Innovation, The FirstAmerican Industrial Revolution, Public Affairs Group, 2012

Nash, Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Julie Roy, Howe, John R, Frederick, Peter J., Davis, Allen F., Winkler, Allan M. (General Editors), The American People, Creating a Nation and a Society, Volume One to 1877, Third Edition, Harper Collins College Publishers, 1994

O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson, The Men Who Lost America, British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire, Yale University Press, 2013

Owens, Carole, The Berkshire Cottages, A Vanishing Era, Cottage Press, 1984

Owens, Carole, The Berkshires Coach Inns to Cottages, Arcadia Publishing, 2004

Palmer, Charles James, History of Lenox and Richmond,, Press of the Sun Printing Company, Pittsfield, MA, 1904 (Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing Legacy Reprints)

Patriquin, William J. and Sloan, Julie L., The Berkshire Glass Works, History Press, 2011

Pritchard, Evan T., Henry Hudson and the Algonquins of New York

Prude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order, Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860, Cambridge University Press 1983

Rakov, Jack, Revolutionaries, A New History of the Invention of America,  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

Raphael, Ray, A People’s History of the American Revolution, How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence, The New Press, 2001

Raphael, Ray, The First American Revolution, Before Lexington and Concord, The New Press, 2002

Richards, Leonard L., Shay’s Rebellion, The American Revolution’s Final Battle, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2002

Rigal, Laura, The American Manufactory: Are, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic, Princeton University Press 1998

Rockman, Seth, Scraping By, Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, Studies in Early American Economhy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2009

Seavoy, Ronald E., An Economic History of the United States From 1607 to the Present, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2006

Sedgewick, John, In My Blood, Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family, Harper Collins e-books, 2006

Simms, Brendan, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, From 1453 to the Present, Basic Books, 2013

Szatmary, David P., Shay’s Rebellion, The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1980

Taylor, Alan, American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Penguin History of the United States, 2001

Taylor, Charles James, History of Great Barrington, Clark W. Bryan Publisher, Great Barrington, MA 1882

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Good Wives, Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750, Vintage Books, 1980

Volo, Dorothy Denneen and James M., Daily Life During the American Revolution, Greenwood Press, 2003

Webb-Peploe, Mrs. Annie, The Pilgrims of New England, A Tale of the Early American Settlers,  e book – A Public Domain Book

Weidensaul, Scott, The First Frontier, The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Wood, David H., Lenox Massachusetts Shire Town, Published by the Town, 1969

Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg Virginia by The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London, 1969, 1998

Wood, Gordon S., The Idea of America, Reflections on the Birth of the United States, The Penguin Press, 2011

Wheeler, Rachel, To Live Upon Hope, Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth Century Northeast, Cornell University Press, 2008

Wood, Gordon S., Empire of Liberty, A History of the Early Republic 1789-1815, The Oxford History of the United States, Oxford University Press, 2009

Worrall, Simon, Pilgrims: The True Story of The Englishmen Who Founded America, 

Yudkin, Jeremy, The Lenox School of Jazz, A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations, Farshaw Publishing, 2006

Historic Preservation

Historic New England

Historic New England is a membership organization that provides tours and workshops on historic preservation.

Lenox Historic District Commission

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Historic District Bylaw

The Lenox Historic District Commission approves alterations, signage and landscaping in the Lenox Historic District.  The goal of the Commission is to encourage maintenance and development that maintains the historic integrity of Lenox village.  It operates under Massachusetts Law Chapter 40C.

 The Massachusetts Historical Commission

The Massachusetts Historical Commission provides limited grants for historic preservation and expertise on historic preservation projects.

National Trust for Historic Preservation

The National Trust for Historic Preservation provides information on historic preservation ordinances and other tools to assist in historic preservation.