History:

Although occupied by the Mahican Indians, the Berkshires remained a primeval forest largely unsettled by whites well-into the 19th century –- long after Colonial society was established in eastern Massachusetts and the Hudson River Valley. One 1694 traveler from Albany to Boston described this region as “a hideous, howling wilderness.”

The mountains on the east and west were a formidable barrier to the advance of white Colonial settlement.

There were political obstacles too. Massachusetts and New York each claimed sections of the Berkshires, and a few early settlers and surveying parties were chased away in territorial skirmishes.

During the French and Indian Wars, the central and northern Berkshires were also vulnerable to attacks by French troops and the fierce Native American tribes who were allied with them. Attack parties temporarily drove away the earliest settlers on the future sites of Lenox, Pittsfield and other towns until 1760.

White settlement began in the southern end of the Berkshires. As early as 1692, a small group of Dutch farmers settled on the southwest border in Mount Washington.

In 1724, a group from Westfield, Mass., in the Connecticut River valley, bought from the Mahicans a large tract around Great Barrington and Sheffield, and Sheffield was incorporated in 1733. In 1736 the General Court established new townships on the sites of Tyringham, New Marlboro, Sandisfield and Becket.

The Mahicans co-existed peacefully with the white intruders. Nevertheless, in 1736 the Massachusetts Legislature ordered that they be moved to a central reservation and Christian mission at Stockbridge and West Stockbridge, including parts of today’s Lenox.

However, these small communities were merely scattered frontier outposts in the Berkshire wilderness. Even though land in Lenox had been granted early to the missionary ministers and others, these parcels and the rest of the county north of Stockbridge remained largely unoccupied by whites for many more years.

First Lenox settlers

The first white family in Lenox, Jonathan and Sarah Hinsdale, arrived from Hartford, Conn., in 1750. Hinsdale built a home at the base of the hill on today’s Stockbridge Road. The first child born in Lenox was their daughter Rhoda in 1751. In the town’s first taste of tourism, Hinsdale eventually established a small inn and general store (where he sold large quantities of rum).

Little is known about Jonathan Hinsdale, but he is said to have been a free-thinking individualist who came to Lenox to get away from the constraints of the city. In Lenox he was banned from the Church in 1775 for challenging standard religious practices and beliefs. Jonathan Hinsdale lived in Lenox until his death in 1811 at the age of 87.
The Hinsdales were soon joined by other families. But before they could establish a community, attacks by hostile Indians forced them temporarily to flee to safety.

Settlement of Lenox and the Berkshires finally began in earnest in the 1760s, with the end of the French and Indian Wars.

The western end of Massachusetts was separated from Hampshire County and incorporated as Berkshire County in 1761, and the Commonwealth auctioned off large parcels of land in the Berkshires for settlement. Existing towns grew, new ones were established rapidly and people began to move into the central and northern county. By the 1791 census, Berkshire County had 30,291 registered residents.

Sadly, with this influx of people, the lands the Mahican tribe had been given earlier became more coveted. Members of the tribe were pressured to sell off their properties to whites, and in 1783 the remaining Mahicans at the Stockbridge mission reluctantly agreed to move to another reservation in New York.

Lenox and Richmond

Portions of Indian land and other parcels were consolidated for sale as Lot Number 8 in 1762. This large tract included the sites of both today’s Richmond and Lenox.

After conflicting earlier land claims were resolved, Lot 8 was sold to Samuel Brown on the condition that he subdivide it to no less than 50 settlers with farms of at least seven acres apiece, and a town would be formed there.

Originally, Richmond had been called Mount Ephraim and Lenox was known as Yokuntown, after an Indian chief. This new consolidated district was renamed Richmond (or Richmont), after Charles Lennox, the Duke of Richmond, a British nobleman who defended the cause of the Colonies in England.

It quickly became obvious that the barrier of mountains running through the middle of this large district made it impossible to form a unified community. So in 1767, Richmond was divided into two separate towns.

The western section kept the name Richmond. The 22 square miles east of the hills was split off into another town and renamed Lenox, after the Duke of Richmond’s family name of Lennox. (The change to Lenox has been blamed on a clerk’s misspelling.)

The first town meeting of Lenox was called by Israel Dewey, a large landowner and town leader, and held at his home (the present site of the Birchwood Inn) on March 1, 1767 at 9 a.m.