New Marlborough, MA
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New Marlborough
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Description of New Marlborough, Massachusetts
New Marlborough is situated on uneven and hilly terrain on an elevated plateau in the southern Berkshires. It was one of the four towns established by the Great and General Court to settle and protect the wilderness trail that was the single route at the time from the lower Housatonic Valley to the Connecticut Valley and Boston. The territory of New Marlborough was granted as the six-mile square Township #2 in 1735.
The surveys of the town were completed in 1737 and the proprietors bought the land the town is on from the Indians for 300 English pounds, a greater sum "than ever paid by other proprietors", as they complained to the General Court. There were 63 original home lots laid out in a "compact and defensible form", one for each of the two ministers expected in the new town, one for a school and one each for the grantees. The grantees were required to put down 40 Sterling pounds to secure their grant. The first settler, Benjamin Wheeler, built his house in 1739 and the first children born in town were twins, a daughter and son for Mr. and Mrs. Brookins. The town meeting of 1774 in New Marlborough gave staunch support to the principles of liberty and inalienable rights which would later be embodied in the Constitution of the new country. By 1759 there were enough settlers to secure formal incorporation of the town.
New Marlborough contains a part of scenic Lake Buel, on which a steamboat ran in the 19th century, Campbell's Falls where the Whiting River pours down an 80' drop, and Tipping Rock. The Rock, a huge 40-ton boulder left behind by retreating glaciers in the ice-age, balances so delicately that one finger can tilt a weight that a bulldozer couldn't move. The town is 1400' above sea level offering cool, fresh mountain air to folk from the city. The town had a number of summer visitors in the 19th century, but its character of a summer resort probably begins formally in 1878 when I.M. Tuttle took over the abandoned buildings of the South Berkshire Institute and began hosting summer boarders, some of whom stayed through the fall. A guide to the Berkshires in 1889 describes the foliage in the autumn as a "wonderful, flaming, shading, rioting of color."
Despite its tourist industry, the town was basically an manufacturing village with grist and cider mills, box factory and the Sheffield Clay Works providing clay for the three major paper mills in town. Stage lines went through town bringing prosperity until the railroad usurped the traffic.
Modern New Marlborough has a well preserved village center clustered around its central green and is more of a residential and rural center than an industrial one.
It is located in southwestern Massachusetts, bordered by Monterey on the north; Sandisfield on the east; Norfolk and North Canaan, Connecticut, on the south; Sheffield on the west; and Great Barrington on the northwest. New Marlborough is 28 miles south of Pittsfield, 47 miles west of Springfield, and 136 miles southwest of Boston.
Narrative compiled by the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development (
DHCD
).
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