Berkshire County

Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum is a historic, Jacobean-style mansion and museum located at 104 Walker Street, Lenox, Massachusetts. It... is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Visitors can tour the mansion and learn about the changes that occurred in American life, industry, and society during the late 19th Century period known as the Gilded Age. The house was built in 1893 for George and Sarah Morgan, sister of J. P. Morgan, to designs by architects Rotch & Tilden. Its exterior is brick with brownstone trim, containing approximately 50 rooms in a total of 28,000 square feet of living space, including 9 main bedrooms and 10 servant's bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, and 17 fireplaces. The house was set within a large landscaped garden of 26 acres . A smaller home was moved off of the property and across the street prior to the construction of Ventfort Hall. This home was owned by the Haggerty family and known as Vent Fort. The colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and civil war hero, Robert Gould Shaw, spent his brief honeymoon here with his wife, Annie Kneeland Haggerty. After Robert's death, Annie moved to Europe.
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East Lawn Cemetery and Sherman Burbank Memorial Chapel is a historic cemetery and chapel 605 Main Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The cemetery... was founded in 1842 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
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The Mount is a country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, the home of noted American author Edith Wharton, who designed the house and its grounds and... considered it her "first real home." The estate, located in the Berkshires, is open to the public from May to October. Visitors are offered tours of the house and gardens. The Mount's main house was inspired by the 17th-century Belton House in England, with additional influences from classical Italian and French architecture. Edith Wharton used the principles described in her first book, The Decoration of Houses , when she designed the house. She thought that good architectural expression included order, scale, and harmony. Its west elevation is three stories; on the garden side it is two stories with an opening out to a large, raised, stone terrace overlooking the grounds. The house exterior is a striking white stucco, strongly set off by black shutters, and rises from a quasi-rustic foundation of coarse field stone. Clusters of gables and white chimneys rise from the roof, which is capped with a balustrade and cupola.
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South Mountain Concert Hall is a historic hall in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It was built in 1918 and added to the National Historic Register in 1973.

The Berkshire Museum is a museum of natural history, art and ancient civilization that is located in Pittsfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts,... United States. The museum was founded in 1903 by Zenas Crane, grandson of the founder of paper-maker Crane & Company, under the auspices of the Berkshire Athenaeum. The vision was to create an educational community museum for all ages. The museum became independent in 1932. Today the museum includes galleries on art, ancient civilization, and natural science including a gallery of dinosaurs and paleontology and a mineral gallery. It has a notable collection of Hudson River school paintings, as well as a work by Norman Rockwell, portraits by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and John Singer Sargent, and kinetic toy sculptures by Alexander Calder. There is also an aquarium. The museum is able to offer a wide array all within one collection. The Ellen Crane Memorial Sculpture Gallery presents neoclassical sculptures, mainly in marble, by sculptors including Giovanni Maria Benzoni , Anna Hyatt Huntington , Randolph Rogers , Franklin Simmons and Giulio Tadolini .
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The Williams College Museum of Art is a teaching museum located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is a department of Williams College. The museum's... mission is to "advance learning through lively and innovative approaches to art for the students of Williams College and communities beyond the campus". The museum is open to the public and free.
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Bartholomew's Cobble is a 329-acre National Natural Landmark, open space preserve, agricultural preserve, and bio-reserve located in southwest... Massachusetts in the village of Ashley Falls abutting Canaan, Connecticut. The preserve contains over 800 plant species including North America's greatest diversity of ferns and the greatest overall biodiversity in Berkshire County, Massachusetts; it also contains Massachusetts' highest populations of ground nesting bobolinks. It was declared a National Natural Landmark in October 1971 The preserve includes two rocky knolls for which the property is named , as well as floodplain along the Konkapot and Housatonic Rivers, working hayfields and pastures, meadows, and 1,000-foot Hurlburt's Hill, an open hilltop with a panoramic view of The Berkshires, the Taconic Mountains, and the Housatonic River Valley. The property has been owned and managed by the non-profit conservation organization The Trustees of Reservations since 1946. Hiking trails and an interpretive center and museum are located on the preserve. Rangers and staff lead guided canoe trips on the Housatonic River in season.
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Hancock Shaker Village is a National Historic Landmark District in Hancock, Massachusetts that was established by Shakers in 1791. It was the third... of nineteen major Shaker villages established between 1783 and 1836 in New York, New England, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana under the leadership of Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright. The Shakers are a religious order who believe in pacifism, celibacy, communal living, and gender equality. In the nineteenth century, Shaker worship included singing, shaking, and ecstatic dance, which is why they were called the "Shaking Quakers," or "Shakers." The utopian sect is renowned today for its plain architecture and furniture. The Hancock community was started in 1783 with the consolidation of land donated by converted farmers, many of them members of the Goodrich family, who were New Light Baptists in the congregation of Valentine Rathbun. Elder Calvin Harlow and Eldress Sarah Harrison were the first leaders of the Hancock Shakers. The group was poor at first, but with good leadership, hard work, and thrift, they attracted more members and built a thriving community of several communal families.
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