Abby Epplett, Historian

During my trip to the Berkshires in July 2023, I visited Saint Francis Gallery , a historic church turned art sales venue. Located in Lee, MA, just down the road from Ashintully Gardens , Tyringham Cobble , and other quick history stops in Tyringham , this site connects religious history, the regional and international art scene, and a charitable cause. Saint Francis Church was built in 1871 in the Italianate style. This building design was intended to be the opposite of the classic whitewashed New England church. The building has a wide, rectangular steeple instead of a narrow, pointed steeple, and the siding is painted pale orange with an orange-brown trim. Another feature setting the church apart are its windows. The congregation commissioned stained glass windows designed by French artist André Mériel-Bussy during the 1920s. The original stained glass windows were unceremoniously smashed, evidenced by modern grounds crew finding shards of colorful glass sca...

A tiny little town with a population under five hundred residents, Tyringham has several cute quick history stops. The sunflower painted silo of Little Way Farm, while not a true history stop, set the stage for the classic and whimsical buildings in the town, including Tyringham School House & Town Offices, Union Church in Tyringham, and Santarella: Tyringham’s Gingerbread House. As a bonus fun fact, the official town website states that the town was named after wealthy Jane Tyringham , who was a cousin of Sir Francis Bernard , the royal governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1762. This makes Tyringham the only town in Massachusetts named after a woman. Tyringham School House & Town Offices Like many small New England towns, Tyringham has its own one-room schoolhouse built in 1877 and now serving as a town-owned building for a wide range of purposes. A school has stood on the site since 1782. I had previously visited many similar schoolhouses, including...

During my trip to the Berkshires in July 2023, I visited Tyringham Cobble , a 240 acre preserve owned by The Trustees of Reservations . While the Cobble Loop Trail is just 2 miles (3.2 km), with the option to add on a 0.25 mile (400 m) out-and-back trail to a local pavilion, parts of the path overlap the historic Appalachian Trail . Clear signage throughout the route ensures that visitors do not become lost on the 2,000 mile (3,540 km) trail and end up in Maine or Florida. The hilly trail is studded with stone, perhaps contributing to its early name “Cobble Hill”. Beginning in 1792, a Shaker village developed in this area. ( The last former Shaker village I visited was Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH back in August 2022. ) According to the National Park Service, Tyringham Shaker Village was the fourth of its kind in Massachusetts alone during the height of Shakerism. Nearby Jerusalem Road was named by the Shakers, along with adjacent Shaker Pond. The...

This post begins a new series! I took a trip to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts during mid July 2023 and visited many historic places along the way. My first stop was Ashintully Gardens in Tyringham, MA , ruins of a grand estate currently preserved by The Trustees of Reservations . According to the official website of the Trustees, this organization “is here to protect and share the Massachusetts places people love for their exceptional scenic, historic, and ecological value”. I have visited several parks managed by the Trustees, many of which will appear in future blog posts.

Yesterday — November 15, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. — I watched the webinar Cuisine and Crisis: An Edible History of the Moche of Ancient Peru presented by Dr. Katherine L. Choiu , a bioarchaeologist from the Ancient People and Plants lab at the University of Alabama , and hosted by the Tallahassee Society branch of the Archaeological Institute of America . The talk focused on Moche society, which existed in the Jequetepeque Valley on the Peruvian coastal desert between the Pacific Ocean and Andes mountains from AD 100 to 800, about the same time as the Classic Maya. Dr. Chiou described how her excavations of Moche sites have revealed the differences in diet between the elite and common people. She believed that study diet is an important but sometimes overlook facet of archaeology, as “food can tell us about where we’ve been and who we are as people”, and differences in diet are “lines drawn between status groups reinforced in daily life”. The elites lived at a site now known ...

Yesterday — November 14, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. EST — I watched the ninety-minute webinar Parallel Tracks: Steinheimer, Silicon Valley, and Steel Rails about the life of photographer Richard “Dick” Steinheimer . The talk was presented by Ken Rehor , an electrical engineer from Palo Alto, CA, and Elrond Lawrence , Acquisitions & Marketing Coordinator at Center for Railroad Photography & Art (CRP&A) , which hosted the webinar. Rehor had met Steinheimer while working with semiconductors at Bell Labs, while Lawrence met him photographing trains in Stockton, CA. The talk covered the life and photography of Steinheimer in great detail with accompanying photographs. The CRP&A currently has 30,000 Steinheimer slides, 4,200 prints, and 2,700 black and white negatives donated by his wife and fellow railfan, Shirley Berman-Steinheimer . Steinheimer began taking photographs of trains in 1946 when he was seventeen years old. He went to City College of San Francisco , where J...

At last, I complete my twenty-three post series on my trip to the Dominican Republic in June 2023. This sequel to yesterday’s posts shares more quick history stops on the streets of the capital, Santo Domingo, including a college building turned into a hotel, ruins of a monastery, and a poetic park. Monasterio de San Francisco On the north side of Ciudad Colonial and bordered by four roads (Calle Restoración, Calle Hostos, Calle Juan Isidro Pérez, Calle Duarte) was Monasterio de San Francisco [Monastery of San Francisco]. With construction ordered by Frey Nicolás de Ovando in 1508 and lasting until 1560, the monastery was the first of its kind in the Americas. The building currently stands in ruins, much like the first European style hospital in the Americas, nearby Templo y Hospital San Nicolás de Bari . Near the ruins was a plaque dedicated to the 50 th anniversary of the Dominican Civil War of 1965, when the American military overthrew the supporters of democra...