By Juliane Hiam
When the images emerged on my computer screen, scanned from the delicate, sharp-edged 19th-century glass plate negatives, I got chills. I saw smiles, shy expressions, people posed on a porch, and on indoor chairs positioned in a yard outside. I saw a Berkshire summertime, one and a quarter centuries ago, in all the expressions we still enjoy today: sunshine and daisies, lace organdie and fine linens, horseback riding, boating on a lake. It was as if I had conjured these people and they were standing in the room with me. But who were they?
These glass plate negatives had been discarded at our local transfer station in North Egremont a couple of years earlier. Bill Wood, the understated renaissance man who was manager of the station at the time, texted me one day and told me about them. There were around 20, thrown into a disheveled paper shopping bag—someone perhaps having thought they were simply broken pieces of glass they wanted to get out of an attic or basement.
I love this kind of thing. I remember realizing at a young age that the stone walls I followed deep into the woods had long ago been the boundaries between open pastures. There was a cellar hole, once a tannery, at the corner of our property that I’d hop down into and use as a playhouse. Even the home I grew up in, a central chimney Cape, felt haunted by the people who once lived there, and I would think of them while I warmed myself at the same fireplace.
As I studied the photos, I noticed a few details. In one, a girl is holding a camera. It seems to be an early Kodak from the late 1880s. So there were at least two cameras in play when these were taken. There are a couple photographs that feature a bicycle. In the background of those photos, beyond horse droppings scattered in the road, there are some signs: “Van Deusenville” and “Green River.”
This is where I briefly took a wrong turn. I mistook the signs as street signs. They’re beside a building architecturally similar enough that I became convinced this was what is now the Michelin Key hotel Granville House Inn on Division Street in Housatonic, situated beside the corner of Van Deusenville Road and less than a half mile from the Green River. I paid a visit to innkeepers Terry and Terri Coughlan and even made them a set of 8 x 10 prints as a gift.
The author’s salvaged film revealed images of people who spent their Berkshire summer weekends taking photographs in the meadows and biking in the sun, much as we do today.
The author’s salvaged film revealed images of people who spent their Berkshire summer weekends taking photographs in the meadows and biking in the sun, much as we do today.
The Berkshires have a storied past, and we all know about the famous figures who once lived here: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and so on. But there are also the rest of the people whose names we might not know, who nonetheless worked the land, felt the sun on their faces, waded into natural bodies of water, and adorned their dresses with posies picked in the surrounding fields.
They were delighted by my arrival on their doorstep, but dubious when they looked through the photos. I was reminiscing about this funny but slightly awkward moment with Terry recently. Terry, the husband of the couple, had very nicely said he didn’t think it was their property in the photos.
“My heart immediately sank as I studied each picture trying to find some architectural touch point that connected the photos to our property. I wanted so badly for this to be our house,” he said, “not just to have a historical keepsake, but even more so to fully receive this incredible act of kindness.”
I then turned to Elisabeth Wood and Gary Leveille, both members of the historical society, and showed them the photos. They had the same experience I had when first seeing them—that same exuberance in studying all the details captured in the 100+ year old emulsion—except that their expertise steered me back on course.
The signs in the background were not street signs, Gary explained; they were directional signs pointing toward the village of Van Deusenville and the Green River. The corner is what is now Route 71 and Prospect Lake Road. Elisabeth dated the photos to be c. 1895–1901 and identified the people in the photos as Seymour Bouton Dewey, his wife Caroline, their daughter and grandchildren, and Elmer L. Corthell, one of the most notable civil engineers of his time who was very close with the Deweys.
Elisabeth Wood confirmed, “E. L. Corthell had a very long association with the Dewey family, and often spent the summer with them. Not only did he house his extensive engineering library in their store [now the North Egremont General Store], but he also purchased their property in North Egremont after Seymour Dewey’s death, which he held until his own death. His son afterward owned the property.”
A boat launch at the North Egremont spot where you’ll now find The Cliff House restaurant; a literary lion of yesteryear; a gathering at what is believed to now be the North Egremont General Store.
Leveille, author of “Eye of Shawenon,” a book about North Egremont, Prospect Lake, and the surrounding areas, was the perfect person to confirm that the house in the photos sits right in the village of North Egremont, and that the lake in the photos is Prospect Lake. He recognized the boat launch photo as being right at the spot where The Cliff House restaurant resides at Prospect Berkshires, the mountain lake resort that opened last year.
I was then excited to show the photos to Jade Snow-Carroll, one of the owners of Prospect Berkshires. “The property that Prospect Berkshires inhabits was originally opened as a picnic ground in the late 1870s,” she said. “The land is steeped in the energy of good times, past and present. Seeing these old photographs reinforces that this energy has been here for a very long time and hopefully will continue onward for many years to come.”
In the end, the photographs reveal a sunny summer weekend in the Berkshires not so different from now: long days, bike rides, friends and family, a love of nature. It feels as much a representation of today as of then. Who were they? They are us, and we are them.
The scans and prints referenced here were made with the assistance of Christian Badach. They were gifted back to the Town of Egremont’s Historical Commission.
