The
Berkshires, a mountainous region extending throughout
western Massachusetts, was a summer and autumn resort
community in the mid- to late nineteenth century.
Inspired by the pastoral landscape,
wealthy families from Boston and New York purchased farms
there and transformed them into country estates. The estates
of this new American aristocracy resembled country seats
in Europe.
Giraud Foster's Bellefontaine was modeled
after the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Anson Phelps Stokes's
Shadowbrook was a Tudor-style home. William Douglas Sloane's
Elm Court was designed in the Shingle style. (30)
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Anson Phelps Stokes's
Shadowbrook
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"Inland Newport"
By the 1880s, the Berkshires had become
known as the "inland Newport," a place where families
made rich by industry resided each summer.
Like Newport,
Lenox and the surrounding towns of Pittsfield and Stockbridge
drew a community of writers and artists, including Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Herman Melville, and Daniel Chester French. By
1900 this list would include Edith
Wharton.
The Whartons' New Home
Edith and Teddy Wharton began summering
in the Lenox, Massachusetts, area in the late 1890s, visiting
Teddy's mother at her Lenox home, Pine Acre, or staying
at the Curtis Hotel. During the summers of 1900 to 1902,
they lived at The Poplars, a summer cottage in Lenox.
(31)
In 1901 the Whartons purchased a 113-acre
plot of land called Laurel Lake Farm from Georgiana Sargent,
watercolorist and distant relative of painter John Singer
Sargent. (32)
A turn-of-the-century photograph shows
the couple standing proudly on the rock outcropping that
would become the foundation for their new home.
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Edith and Teddy
Wharton
at the Site of The Mount
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The site commanded a view of Laurel
Lake, and beyond, the Tyringham Mountains.
Writing to her friend Sara Norton
the summer before moving into The
Mount, Wharton said, "Lenox has has its usual tonic
effect on me, & I feel like a new edition, revised
& corrected, in Berkeley's best type." (33)
