The Rural We: John Dixon
The expert on the industrial past of the Berkshires explains why the area is still dotted with historic mill buildings.
Despite a long career in the foreign service (and the Peace Corps before that), John Dixon has a special fascination with Berkshires history, particularly its industrial past and the many old mill buildings still intact or in partial ruin in Berkshire County. He will be giving a talk, “The Industrial History of the Berkshires” at the Bidwell House Museum in Monterey on Sunday, September 17 at 1 p.m., both in person and on Zoom.
I was in the Peace Corps in Gabon, central Africa, in the late 70s as an English teacher in a French-speaking country. When I was there, I met a young woman from Pittsfield also serving there, and we got married. When we came back, I taught in New Hampshire public schools, then joined the foreign service in public diplomacy, which meant press and culture. I served as a cultural officer in Nigeria, South Africa, Peru, and Mexico, and became deputy chief of mission in Mexico and Ottawa. We also spent two five-year tours in Washington, DC. It was a wonderful career.
When we retired, we came back to Pittsfield and bought a house that had been in my wife’s great grandfather’s family, spending a couple years rehabilitating it. The restoration of the house moved me into the arena of historic preservation. I went back to university and got a master’s degree in history at UMass. I interned at the Berkshire Historical Society and one of my projects focused on Berkshire County’s industrial heritage. Through that I concentrated on the mills. I chose to study the mill that abuts my house, one of the old Pontoosuc woolen mills, now called Wyandotte. I turned that research into a book for Arcadia Publishing, which publishes books about local history.
People come to history through personal experiences, as I did — I was living next door to a mill. As I drove around the county to research, I would see these massive buildings — 11 woolen mills in Pittsfield alone. For a rural county, this was unique, with its niches in paper and wool. There was a confluence of events around 1800 with the arrival of Zenas Crane looking for clear water to make paper. He found it in Dalton, but there were other fast-moving streams leading into the Housatonic River that could power the mills. Elkanah Watson brought in Merino sheep. That high-quality wool, fast-moving water and machine created the perfect storm. By the late 1800s there were 500 manufacturing establishments in the Berkshire County, making glass, iron, rakes, shoes, pens, and paper.
A number of the old mills have been repurposed. The Silk Mill in Pittsfield has been converted into apartments and the Stationery Factory in Dalton is a multipurpose and event space, just two of the functional, solid buildings that are still standing.
