Past Events

2022-23 Melville Fellows Ashton Bird and Josie Overbook, both students at Berkshire Community College, will present free readings of original works created during their time at Arrowhead as part of Pittsfield’s 10 x 10 Winter Upstreet Arts Festival.  In addition, both fellows will present original artwork inspired by their time at Melville’s home. Reservations are not required. Ashton Bird will be presenting a mixed-media piece that involves a digital rendering of Arrowhead’s Piazza, and an abstract component completed with acrylic…

Click here for tickets. Pittsfield’s commercial brewing history was over 60 years in the making when, in 1886, Jacob Gimlich, one of the principals of the successful Pittsfield brewery firm Gimlich and White, declared people should “use beer for their refreshment and invigoration in a temperate, manly, proper way.” Join the Berkshire County Historical  Society as it explores this history as well as contemporary Berkshire brewing with a lecture by Cynthia Brown, historian and BCHS President, and tasting from Hot…

Click here to purchase tickets. Birds are miraculous!  Especially in Spring when they dazzle us with bright, nuptial colors and serenade us with a profusion of happy song.  This Earth Day the Berkshire County Historical Society will host a bird walk at Herman Melville’s historic home, Arrowhead. Ben Nickley, Director of Berkshire Bird Observatory, will lead the walk, helping participants find and identify many newly arrived migratory birds. This walk will be a celebration of nature, renewal and all that birds…

Celebrate BCHS's partnership with Berkshire Mountain Distillers and their Cultural Cocktail program with a pub crawl through downtown Pittsfield. We'll begin at Patrick's Pub and wind up at Methuselah Bar and Lounge where you can taste BCHS's Cultural Cocktail developed with Berkshire Mountain Distillers. Along the way we'll visit also visit Thistle and Mirth, Hot Plate Brewing Co., and Berkshire Palate and explore various aspects of downtown Pittsfield history. Learn about the famous “Fighting Parson,” a Revolutionary War prison, the…

Local author Lorraine German discusses her book Soil and Shul in the Berkshires: The Untold Story of Sandisfield’s Jewish Farm Colony. Learn about the 1902 settlement in south Berkshire county and its final days when the congregation turned the synagogue over to the Sandisfield Arts Center in 1995. FREE Sponsored by MountainOne

Sailing Towards My Father is a one-man play about Herman Melville. The play chronicles Melville’s life from youth to old age, concentrating on his evolution as a writer and his complex relations with God, his parents and siblings, his wife and children, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Performed by Stephen Collins, written and directed by Carl A. Rossi. $10 BCHS Members, $15 non members. Use the Book Now button to purchase tickets.  Not a member?  Join here and start saving on programs…

Thursday, July 13, 7:30 pm PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT TAKES PLACE RAIN OR SHINE ReWritten, created and performed by Tom Truss and Matthew Cumbie, is an immersive performance that explores the intimate relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Through dance, live music, projection, art installations, and text, ReWritten moves in and around the grounds of Arrowhead and reimagines an intergenerational queer love story that has shaped American literature. Our third year in residence at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, this year’s…

Friday, July 14, 7:30 pm PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT TAKES PLACE RAIN OR SHINE ReWritten, created and performed by Tom Truss and Matthew Cumbie, is an immersive performance that explores the intimate relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Through dance, live music, projection, art installations, and text, ReWritten moves in and around the grounds of Arrowhead and reimagines an intergenerational queer love story that has shaped American literature. Our third year in residence at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, this year’s…