Morgan Bulkeley first saw the Berkshires on a golden fall day in 1928. A school outing brought him to Bear Mountain, where he ate a sandwich as his eyes feasted on the natural beauty spread before him. He was fourteen and suddenly found himself in love with a place.
In more than 100 pithy, beautiful, and frequently witty pieces, Bulkeley records the incredibly complex riches of his beloved Berkshire County. Organized into four sections (history, nature, people, and conservation), Berkshire Stories offers a profound portrait of an evolving community and landscape. Reading these stories, we come to understand what it means to truly inhabit a place. We not only get to know its history and people, its ecology, plants, birds, and animals, but also its geological past and its potentially human future.
Anyone who has ever been touched by the rich beauty of the Berkshires―whether for the first time or as a lifelong resident―will love this book.
Berkshire Stories is illustrated throughout with drawings by the well-known artist Morgan Bulkeley, Jr., the author’s son.
Contents:
- Foreword by Morgan Bulkeley, Jr.
- By Way of Introduction
- Berkshire History
- Berkshire Nature
- Birding and Botanizing
- Berkshire People
- Conserving the Berkshires
About the Author
Morgan Bulkeley, Sr., was born a Connecticut Yankee in Hartford in 1913. Upon graduating from Yale University in 1936, he lived a Thoreavian year in a cabin on the shores of Plantain Pond in the tiny hilltop town of Mount Washington. Five years later, he came back to the mountain and settled down to life as a self-sufficient farmer, raising a family and always deepening his knowledvge and love of nature. He worked, too, as a writer and poet, and studied with Robert Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In the early 1960s he began to write the “Our Berkshires” column for the Berkshire Eagle. Over the years he wrote more than 750 articles from which the amazing collection Berkshire Stories is drawn. Presently, he and his wife tend a small garden at their home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
Morgan Bulkeley, Jr., was born in 1944 and grew up on his parents’ farm in Mount Washington. He graduated from Yale in 1966 and, after fourteen years as an artist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, returned to his childhood home with his wife Eleanor Tillinghast, whose family had summered in Mount Washington for five generations. His painted and sculpted tales of nature colliding with culture are represented by the Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington and at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston.
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