Past Events

Enjoy the start of the fall season at Arrowhead with a FREE day of food, fun, music, history, hands-on activities, traditional craft demonstrations, and more! House tours are available by ticket only, Revolutionary War reenactors will be interpreting camp life, and visitors are encouraged to speak with participants about their activities and everyday life during the war. Drills will be performed, along with three separate musket demonstrations throughout the day. Refreshments for purchase will be provided by SoCo Creamery. In…

Enjoy a special farm to table dinner in Arrowhead's historic barn.  Brennan's Catering has created a menu highlighting the bounty of fall including pork, brisket and butternut squash ravioli. Dinner will be served with cider pairings selected by Berkshire Cider Project. . Our special guest is  renown historian John Demos, who will present the lecture  In the Shadow of the Founders: Greatest Generations in American History (see more info below). The event also includes a silent auction that includes food,…

Noted author Tom Piazza will discuss The Auburn Conference, his new historical novel that features Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other notable figures appearing at a fictionalized tiny upstate New York college in 1883. Tom Piazza is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels The Auburn Conference and City Of Refuge, the short-story collection Blues and Trouble, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and the essay collection…

Join us on Park Square for the ceremonial planting of a young elm tree on Plant a Tree Day.  The tree will be planted to honor the Berkshires’ first known environmentalist Lucretia Williams. Learn about the woman who threw herself before the woodsman’s axe to save the towering elm on Park Square in 1789. The tree planting is made possible with the help of the Pittsfield Parks Department and George and Alice Wislocki. Image: The Old Elm, mid-19th century. Collection of…

Join veteran tour guide John Dickson and Executive Director Lesley Herzberg for a FREE enlightening walk around the grounds of Arrowhead. John Dickson will provide an overview of the evolution of the architectural features of the building from the 1780s to the present. This talk is followed by Lesley Herzberg’s walk through the north field to discuss the cultural landscape where the entire Melville family participated in the cultivation of the farm and gardens in the 19th century. (Rain date:…

Please join us online as we discuss, Dayswork, a new novel written collaboratively by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. The novel is about a woman, who during the pandemic quarantine, becomes obsessed with Melville and particularly his life at Arrowhead.  The novel has been hailed as “A remarkable, unusually rewarding work” by Kirkus Reviews and “A love letter to literature” Alexander Chee email melville@berkshirehistory.org to receive the zoom link

When you think of archaeology, you might think of Egypt, Ancient Greece, or Mexico before considering Massachusetts. But here in our state we have some fascinating archaeology and some sites with memorable stories to tell. This FREE lecture takes you from Boston to the Berkshires showing sites from thousands of years ago to the  late-nineteenth century. The lecture is presented by Eric Johnson, PhD, a semi-retired lecturer from the Department of Anthropology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. FREE This event…

Join Tyringham resident and historian John Hanson on a walking tour of significant gravestones in this historic Lenox cemetery. Hanson has been collecting epitaphs and studying early New England gravestones for years. On this tour, he will discuss the iconography of the stones, share some noteworthy verses, and discuss what they tell us about early New Englanders’ attitudes towards life and death. Meet at the Church on the Hill parking lot. $15 BCHS members, $20 nonmembers Use the BOOK NOW…