STOCKBRIDGE , just south of I-90 fifty miles west of Springfield, started out as "Indian Town," because the Nipmuck Indians had several villages in the area. The Reverend John Sergeant built the simple wooden Mission House , now located on Main Street, in 1739 in an attempt to live in close proximity with the local Native Americans and convert them to Christianity by sheer force of example. His success barely lasted beyond his own death; later settlers were far less keen on having the natives around.
That Stockbridge today looks the archetypal New England small town - most of all when there's snow on the ground - is due largely to the artist Norman Rockwell , who lived here for 25 years until his death in 1978. Many of his Saturday Evening Post covers, whose sentimentality was made palatable by his sharp wit, featured the town; a collection of covers can be seen at the $10 million museum on Hwy-183 (May-Oct daily 10am-5pm; Nov-April weekdays 10am-4pm, weekends 10am-5pm; $12). Some of the tour guides modeled for Rockwell as children and recall that for every few minutes they managed to hold still he'd slip them a coin from his large pile of nickels.
Magnificent houses in the hills around Stockbridge include Chesterwood , the luxurious home and studio of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial (late May to Oct daily 10am-5pm; $6.50), half a mile south of the new Rockwell Museum, and Naumkeag , which belonged to Joseph Choate, US ambassador to Queen Victoria (May-Oct daily 10am-5pm). Stockbridge was also the setting for Arlo Guthrie's song, and movie, Alice's Restaurant .
Well-heeled tourists flock to nearby LENOX each year for the summer season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood . Open-air symphonic concerts are held every Friday, Saturday and Sunday in July and August, with chamber music and recitals given on other days; covered seats are pricey and often hard to get, but you can sit and picnic on the lush lawns for an admission fee of around $15. Some midweek rehearsals are also open to the public (tel 413/637-1666 for details), and there's a jazz festival on Labor Day weekend (the first weekend of September). Further north on US-7, Arrowhead (June-Nov daily 9.30am-5pm; $5), near Pittsfield, was Herman Melville's home while he wrote Moby Dick ; declining sales of his books eventually forced him to sell up and move to New York. The Hancock Shaker Village , five miles west of Pittsfield, survived from 1783 to 1960 (daily: June-Oct 9.30am-5pm; Nov-May 10am-3pm; $9). Its legacy includes the large dwelling place, in which almost one hundred people slept and ate; a round stone barn for their cattle; and the garage where the last Shakers kept their cars. A more important, and much less commercialized Shaker village, Mount Lebanon , is another five miles west on US-20, just over the New York state border; much has been dismantled and moved to museums, but self-guided tours give a sense of the Shaker way of life ($5).
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