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Mount Lebanon HerbFest Unveils the Secrets of Shaker Swamp

From the Native Americans to the Shakers, from the Tilden Pharmaceutical Company (1824–1960) to today’s alternative-healing practitioners and locavore chefs, the residents of New Lebanon, NY, have benefited for centuries from the town’s greatest natural resource: herbs. "Austerlitz has blueberries, West Stockbridge has zucchinis, and we

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Ventfort Hall's First Annual Spring Antiques Show

One of the goals of Rural Intelligence has always been to break through the imaginary glass walls that divide Berkshire, Columbia, Dutchess, and Litchfield counties and to foster a sense of regional community and promote interstate commerce. Thus, we were overjoyed to learn that Ventfort Hall (Mansion and Gilded Age

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38th Annual Chesterwood Antique and Classic Auto Show

On Sunday, May 27, Chesterwood, the 129-acre Glendale, MA home of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of, among other iconic monuments, the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., will be the setting for the 2012 Chesterwood Antique & Classic Automobile Show. Son of the

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A Whale of a Celebration for Melville and Moby-Dick

In organizing Call Me Melville, a summer-long festival celebrating Herman Melville and the work he’s best known for, Moby-Dick, Megan Whilden has discovered that “a novel about obsession breeds obsession.” For example, there’s the Brooklyn-based band Call Me Ishmael, which has composed 135 songs about Moby-Dick, one for

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New Documentary Focuses on Photographer Gregory Crewdson

When Gregory Crewdson was 16, he had his first fifteen minutes of fame in the form of a three-minute pop song. Crewdson played guitar in a new wave band called The Speedies, and in 1979 they had a minor hit with the song "Let Me Take Your Photo,"

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Empire State of Mind: New York Heritage Weekend Is Here

Frederick Church’s quirky, Persian-inspired homestead, Olana, grandly set atop a hill for the kind of Hudson River Valley view that inspired so many of the painters’ contemporaries (i.e., the Hudson River School), is the ideal starting point for New York Heritage Weekend, May 19 and 20. Established in

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Whose Omi Is it Anyway?

Omi International Arts Center in Ghent has serious ivory-tower cred. Among the most selective artists' retreats in this country, Omi stands out for its reach beyond U.S. borders for applicants. Perhaps that's because its founder, Francis Greenburger, son of Sanford J. Greenburger, the legendary literary agent

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At Chesterwood, Meadowlark Gets a Hammertown-Style Makeover

When sculptor Daniel Chester French, he of Lincoln Memorial and Minute Man fame, needed to escape the friends, family members, clients, models, assistants, and assorted others who disrupted the serenity of the home, studio, and gardens of his Stockbridge, Massachusetts estate, Chesterwood, he would steal away to his “Little Studio,

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Rural Intelligence Returns! Publication Resumes on May 3

Rural Intelligence, the four-year-old online culture-and-lifestyle magazine for Berkshire, Columbia, Dutchess and Litchfield counties that has been on hiatus for the past six months, will resume publication at the beginning of May. Mark Williams, who lives in the Tyringham Valley of Massachusetts, has purchased Rural Intelligence from its founders, Marilyn

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Passages: A Farewell from Marilyn & Dan

From the start, Rural Intelligence was an experiment. Our goal to create an online culture-and-lifestyle magazine that would unite four counties in three states was and remains, as far as we know, unique.  We are proud of the work we've done and that we've succeeded in

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The Hyde Park Trail: History in Motion

by Kathryn Matthews “If beauty is good for the soul, then I wish I could have taken the whole world to walk with me early Saturday morning in the woods at Hyde Park,” Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote of her restorative walks at Val-Kill, her Dutchess County retreat. Dogwood trees in

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The Wassaic Project: A Pop-Up Museum and Pizza, Too

"Everybody is asking if this is an art installation or a real pizza oven," said Angelo Womack, who was splitting wood on Wednesday outside Maxon Mills (below), which is the headquarters for the third iteration of the Wassaic Project Summer Festival. "This is a real wood-fired oven.

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