1790-1933: From Farm to Festival Jacob’s Pillow began in 1790 as a hard-scrabble mountaintop farm at the crest of a twisting, climbing stagecoach road between Boston and Albany. Local folk viewing the zig-zagging road from the bottom of the hill thought it resembled the rungs of a ladder, so these biblically minded New Englanders dubbed it “Jacob’s Ladder.” Boulders dotted the farm pastures, among them a curiously-shaped one located behind the farmhouse. Given the rock “pillow” and the farm’s proximity to “Jacob’s Ladder,” the Carter Family, who settled the property, furthered local allusions to the Book of Genesis (which tells of Jacob laying his head upon a rock and dreaming of a ladder to heaven) by giving their farm the name “Jacob’s Pillow.”

In 1930, modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn bought the farm as a retreat. At that time, Shawn and his wife, Ruth St. Denis, were America’s leading couple of the dance. Their Denishawn Company had popularized a revolutionary dance form rooted in theatrical and ethnic traditions rather than those of European ballet. Their trailblazing work and cross-country tours paved the way for the next generation of legendary modern dance pioneers: Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, and Doris Humphrey were all Denishawn members. But Shawn and St. Denis had recently separated, personally and professionally, and in the fall of 1931, Shawn conducted the last rehearsals of the Denishawn era at Jacob’s Pillow. Shawn had long harbored a dream of legitimizing the dance in America as a honorable career for men. In 1933, he recruited eight men, including Denishawn dancer Barton Mumaw and several physical education students from Springfield College (then a men’s school) for his new company.

The tall and burly Shawn and his athletic dancers were intent on challenging the “sissy” image of men in the dance; they forged a new, boldly muscular style in dances celebrating Pawnee braves, toiling Black sharecroppers, and Union machinists. In their “off-time,” they built structures still used today at Jacob’s Pillow. 1933-1942: Festival Roots In July 1933, Shawn and his Men Dancers started giving public “Tea Lecture Demonstrations” to promote their work–and to pay the grocer! The first audience of 45 curiosity-seekers expanded weekly so that by summer’s end, people were turned away: roots for what was to evolve into the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival were established. From 1933 to 1940, a period Shawn termed “seven magic years,” Shawn and his Men Dancers toured throughout the United States and to Canada, Cuba, and England, performing more than 1,250 times in 750 cities, and continued the summer “Tea Lecture Demonstrations” at the Pillow.

With the Selective Service Act of 1939, Shawn felt his personal and professional crusade had been a success–public, press, and educators were accepting the dance as an honorable profession for men. In May 1940, The Men Dancers disbanded and joined the armed forces. Deep in debt, Shawn proposed selling Jacob’s Pillow to Mary Washington Ball, a dance teacher, who leased the property with the option to buy and produced the Berkshire Hills Dance Festival on site in 1940. Shawn credited Miss Ball for beginning the diverse programming that was forever after the Pillow’s hallmark, but the summer was a financial disaster. Shawn leased the Pillow again in 1941, this time to British ballet stars Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin. Their International Dance Festival was so successful that local supporters formed the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Committee, raised $50,000 to buy the property and to build a theatre (performances had been held in the barn studio), and made Shawn director in 1942. Despite wartime hardships, such as gasoline and tire rationing, audiences climbed the hill on foot and horseback to attend a wide array of programs: ballet, modern dance, mime, ballroom dance, and folk and classical dance of many cultures.

1942-1997: America’s First Dance Theatre On July 9, 1942, the Ted Shawn Theatre, the first theatre in the United States designed specifically for dance, opened its doors. Architect Joseph Franz, who also built The Music Shed at Tanglewood, had agreed with Shawn that the theatre exterior must harmonize with the existing farmhouse and barns. Franz also handcut the weathervane atop the theatre, which depicts Barton Mumaw, Shawn’s leading dancer. Within the theatre and flanking the proscenium are life-size paintings of Shawn in his Hopi Indian Eagle Dance and St. Denis as Kwannon–the Japanese Goddess of Mercy. Both were painted during the Denishawn era by Albert Herter (whose son won greater fame as Governor of Massachusetts and later as Secretary of State under Eisenhower). Other than a year sabbatical for an Australian tour in 1947, Shawn remained at the helm of the Pillow until his death at the age of 81 in 1972.

For a time the future of Jacob’s Pillow seemed uncertain. Shawn’s designated successor, John Christian, was unable to serve more than one year (1972) due to illness. Next was dance critic Walter Terry (1973), but a huge deficit sent the Pillow’s board of directors searching again, and in the interim Charles Reinhart took on the Pillow in addition to the American Dance Festival (1974). A measure of stability came with the appointment of Norman Walker (1975-79), who revamped and upgraded the Pillow’s educational and presentational standards. Liz Thompson (1980-89) initiated an artistic resurgence by welcoming new artists and audiences. Her innovations, such as the popular “Inside/Out” presentations and open access to the grounds and studios, are today an integral part of the Pillow’s personality, and Thompson was also the catalyst for the construction of the Studio/Theatre.

Samuel A. Miller, who had worked in partnership with Thompson since 1986, followed in her footsteps (1990-94) with the sorely needed renovation and enlargement of the Ted Shawn Theatre and the installation of Blake’s Barn. From 1995 through 1997, Sali Ann Kriegsman led the Pillow through a difficult period, eliminating a potentially disastrous $4.8 million debt and then orchestrating a range of new projects to celebrate the 65th anniversary season. After Kriegsman’s tenure ended successfully in 1997, the Board launched an extensive nationwide search and selected Ella Baff to guide Jacob’s Pillow into the 21st century.

1998-present: A Dance Continuum Ella Baff’s record-breaking seasons have confirmed that her adventurous ideas and wide-ranging knowledge of the field are perfectly at home here. She is now leading the Pillow in new directions while honoring the traditions that have made the Pillow a unique institution for almost seven decades: to present and preserve a wide-ranging variety of dance forms, a diversity unparalleled among American dance festivals. The Pillow’s national status was underlined in 2000 with two noteworthy distinctions: it was included on the Dance Heritage Coalition’s list of America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 2003, the federal government named Jacob’s Pillow a National Historic Landmark for its importance in America’s culture and history, thus distinguishing the Pillow as the country’s first and only Landmark dance institution. The friendly, down-home traditions at Jacob’s Pillow, such as the ringing bell announcing that the Ted Shawn Theatre is open for seating and pre-curtain speeches, are carried over from Shawn’s day. Likewise, through careful and considered expansions and renovations of Jacob’s Pillow programs and campus, this historic site in American dance retains the rustic ambiance of “the farm,” as Shawn called it. By honoring the past, reveling in the present, and planning for the future, Jacob’s Pillow remains true to its founder’s vision: to present and preserve an unparalleled variety of dance forms, a diversity unique among American dance festivals. An illustrated history, A Certain Place: The Jacob’s Pillow Story, authored by Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, is available at The Store at Jacob’s Pillow.

Begged, Borrowed and Stolen — Secrets from the Country’s Foremost Gardeners
Saturday, November 3
2 — 4 p.m.
Slide-illustrated lecture
Members $16; Non-members $21
All levels

Join author, photographer and horticulturalist, Tovah Martin for a closer look at just what makes a garden great. With her astute observations of gardens and gardeners, Tovah will take participants on a visually beautiful whirlwind tour of some of the most original gardens around. She will share the secrets of the gardeners that made them and how to realize these ideas in your own garden. Whether inheriting an established garden or starting from scratch, learn these simple ways to make a garden yours!

Tovah Martin is a garden writer, photographer and horticulturalist. She is the author of many gardening books including co-author of Tasha Tudor’s Garden that won the highest award from the Garden Writers Association of Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

Melville’s associations with Berkshire County began in his childhood. The grandson of two Revolutionary War heroes, Melville was born in New York City in 1819. His mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville, was the daughter of General Peter Gansevoort of Albany, who was called the “Hero of Fort Stanwix” due to his role in the defense of that fort in Rome, New York, during the Revolution. (Melville would name his second son Stanwix in honor of that event.) The Gansevoorts had come to the new world in the 1600s and established themselves as one of the first families of Dutch Albany.

Melville’s father, Allan Melvill, was also from a prominent family, this time from Boston. Allan was the son of Thomas Melvill, the son of a Scottish immigrant who achieved wealth as a merchant. Thomas Melvill, too, had a revolutionary pedigree, having been a participant at the Boston Tea Party and a major in General Washington’s army. Washington later appointed Melvill Commissioner of Boston and Charlestown Harbor, an appointment reaffirmed by Presidents Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. It was Thomas Melvill who first bought property in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1816.

After their marriage in 1814, Herman’s parents had settled in New York City and begun their ascent in New York society. Young Herman’s world was one of servants and dancing schools. When Herman was only 11, however, Herman’s father went bankrupt, forcing the family, which now included eight children, to flee the creditors and move to Albany. Just two years later, Allan Melvill died, leaving his widow with eight children under the age of 17. Herman and his older brother Gansevoort were pulled out of school in order to help support the family.

In 1832, Melville (after Allan’s death, Maria added an “e” to the family name) made his first visit to Pittsfield to visit his Uncle Thomas who lived in the house owned by Major Thomas Melvill. Herman fell in love with the Melvill farm and spent many happy hours there working the farm and hiking the land. His annual visits there would continue until 1850, when Melville decided to move his family to Pittsfield permanently.

In the years after Allan Melvill’s death, Herman received only sporadic educational instruction and he struggled to find a vocation. He worked as a bank clerk, a clerk in a cap and fur store, and a schoolteacher in Pittsfield and in New York State. He took a surveyor’s course and went west hoping to find a job. He also did a stint in the merchant marine, sailing on the St. Lawrence as a “boy” in 1839.

In 1841, Melville signed on the whaler Acushnet and set sail from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on a three-year whaling voyage. He jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, motivated to leave by an unpleasant captain, and spent four weeks among the natives before boarding other ships for a trip to the Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii.

After months working in various jobs, for awhile as a bowling pin setter, Melville became restless again and joined the United States Navy, sailing for New York on the ship United States. He returned to New York no more clear on his future occupation, but filled with marvelous stories.

After settling back with his family in Lansingburgh, New York, outside Albany, Herman began to write down his stories at the urging of his sisters. The result was five books all drawing on his experiences at sea. Typee (1846) was based on Melville’s adventures after jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands; its sequel was Omoo (1847). Mardi (1849) was a South Seas fantasy. Redburn (1849) was a semi-autobiographical account of Melville’s days in the merchant marine, and White-Jacket (1849) told the tale of life on a U.S. man-of-war.

Melville enjoyed moderate success with these novels and was now an established member of the American literary scene, although he was not making much money from his writing. He had also won the heart and hand of Miss Elizabeth Knapp Shaw of Boston, the daughter of an old family friend, Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The young couple settled in New York City, with Melville hoping to make a career as a writer.

In 1850, Herman, Lizzie, and their baby son Malcolm spent the summer in Pittsfield at the Melvill farm. Herman was inspired by the beauty of the region, particularly the view of Mount Greylock, highest point in Massachusetts, from the farm house window. He was working on a story about the whale fisheries as well as writing some literary reviews for a friend’s magazine when he was invited to go on a picnic to Monument Mountain, just south of Pittsfield. Also invited on the excursion were two other literary notables: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both Berkshire residents. Melville and Hawthorne met for the first time and struck up an instantaneous close friendship.

The impulsive Melville made the decision to follow Hawthorne’s example and move permanently to the Berkshires to find a quiet solitude in which to write. Melville thought of the beautiful view of Mount Greylock from the Melvill farm, and within a week had purchased the neighboring farm which commanded a similar view. He named the farm “Arrowhead” after the native relics he discovered as he was plowing the fields. The home would remain his for the next 13 years, and there he would write some of his finest works.

The house at Arrowhead had been built in 1780. A rambling old farm house, it became the home for Herman, Lizzie, Malcolm, and three more children, all born at Arrowhead: Stanwix, Bessie, and Fanny. Herman’s mother and sisters Augusta, Helen, and Fanny all moved to Arrowhead as well. Sister Kate and numerous other friends and relations would make their home there as well at various times. It was a busy, chaotic household.

StudyHerman created a refuge from this chaos in his second-floor library.

Keeping to a regular writing schedule, he completed four novels, a collection of short stories, and 10 magazine pieces, as well as beginning work on a volume of poetry. The works Melville wrote at Arrowhead included Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, and such short stories as “I and My Chimney,” “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.”

Arrowhead influenced him greatly in his writing. The view of Mount Greylock from his study window, the one that brought him to Arrowhead, was said to be his inspiration for the white whale in Moby-Dick. He dedicated his next novel, Pierre, to Mount Greylock. His short story, “The Piazza,” begins at Arrowhead and takes a magical journey to the mountain.

Melville incorporated features and aspects of Arrowhead into several stories. The piazza, after which the story and the book The Piazza Tales were named, is a porch Melville added to the north side of Arrowhead shortly after he purchased the property. Visitors can still stand on that porch and look at the same view Melville had when he spent hours there in his rocking chair.

* Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the convenience of those who might desire to feast upon the view, and take their time and ease about it, seemed as much of an omission as if a picture-gallery should have no bench; for what but picture-galleries are the marble halls of these same limestone hills?–galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh.
– Melville in “The Piazza.”

Chimney The story “I and My Chimney,” published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1856, contains one of the most complete descriptions there is of Arrowhead during the Melville occupancy. The story is a fictitious account of the efforts of a wife to remodel an ancient farm house by replacing the central chimney with a grand hallway. Melville used Arrowhead as a model for the house, and the story is filled with accurate descriptions.

* It need hardly be said, that the walls of my house are entirely free from fire-places. These all congregate in the middle–in the one grand central chimney, upon all four sides of which are hearths–two tiers of hearths–so that when, in the various chambers, my family and guests are warming themselves of a cold winter’s night, just before retiring, then, though at the time they may not be thinking so, all their faces mutually look towards each other, yea, all their feet point to one centre; and when they go to sleep in their beds, they all sleep round one warm chimney[.]

So proud of this story was Herman’s younger brother Allan, who moved into Arrowhead after his brother moved out, that he had inscribed on the chimney itself text from the story. The text remains for the visitor to see along with an original copy of the story.

The beauty which surrounds the property also made its way into Melville’s works. The novel Israel Potter is based on the life of a real person born in Rhode Island. In his novel, however, Melviille moved Potter’s birthplace to the Berkshires and devoted the entire first chapter to a lyrical description of the area surrounding Arrowhead. (Visitors can see this same view from the Nature Trail on the property.)

* In fine clear June days, the bloom of these mountains is beyond expression delightful. Last visiting these heights ere she vanishes, Spring, like the sunset, flings her sweetest charms upon them. Each tuft of upland grass is musked like a bouquet with perfume. The balmy breeze swings to and fro like a censer. On one side the eye follows for the space of an eagle’s flight, the serpentine mountain chains, southward from the great purple dome of Taconic–the St. Peter’s of these hills–northwards to the twin summits of Saddleback, which is the two-steepled natural cathedral of Berkshire; while low down to the west the Housatonic winds on in her watery labyrinth, through charming meadows basking in the reflected rays from the hill-sides.

Melville lived, farmed, and wrote at Arrowhead for 13 years. But during that time, although he was writing his best work, he was not making a living from his writing.

Melville’s family life was punctuated with moments of joy and with difficulties. His four children enjoyed the bucolic life in Pittsfield, although Lizzie had difficulty with her hay fever and frequently took trips back home to Boston. As much as Melville loved the Berkshires, he grew frustrated at the lack of success of his writing career and found his debts mounting. With family pressures to find gainful employment, and during the disruptions of the Civil War, Melville decided it was time to move his family from his beloved farm and return to New York City. There he found work as a customs inspector at the New York Customs House, a job he held for over 20 years, working six days a week with only two weeks of vacation a year. The man who had sailed the world and written the greatest of American literature now found himself confined to a desk job that paid four dollars a day.

Melville sold Arrowhead to his brother Allan who used it first as a summer home and then moved there permanently. Melville continued to visit Arrowhead through the 1880s. The Melville family owned the house until 1927. In 1975, the Berkshire County Historical Society purchased the house and began its restoration.

Melville stopped writing prose almost entirely for the rest of his life, turning to poetry and self-publishing five volumes before his death in 1891. In 1886 he presented Lizzie with a book of poetry entitled Weeds and Wildings, Chiefly, with a Rose or Two. Many of the poems were about happy days at Arrowhead. His final published work was Billy Budd, the only prose he had written since 1857; it was not published until 1924, 33 years after Melville’s death.

The Berkshire Museum was founded in 1903 by Zenas Crane, the grandson of the founder of Crane & Company. When he built the museum, his vision was to create an inviting environment for everyone, not just the elite. He sought to use the museum’s varied collection to enrich, educate and delight the county’s citizens of all ages. This vision guides the museum to this day. At the heart of the museum’s mission is a commitment to playing an active cultural and educational role in the community.

“Wally,” our life-size front lawn-dwelling stegosaurus, was constructed for the Sinclair Dinoland Pavilion at the 1964-65 World’s Fair by the renowned wildlife sculptor Louis Paul Jonas. He welcomes visitors to the only art, natural science and history museum in Western Massachusetts. Fourteen galleries, an aquarium, a 291 seat fully equipped, air conditioned theater, classrooms and a museum store make up the Berkshire Museum. At the Berkshire Museum, you will find:

* Thirteen galleries
* Aquarium featuring a touch tank
* 291 seat air conditioned theater
* Classrooms
* The Museum Store features unique, affordable items for the whole family, including a large selection of educational games and toys for kids.

MISSION

The mission of the Berkshire Museum is to enrich, inspire and educate through interactions with the arts, history and the natural world.