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Railroad and Highway Map for the Famous Berkshire Hills Region, Showing also Villages and Points of Interest: From Official Records and Other Information.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts: Berkshire Life Insurance Company; [Sun Printing Company], 1883. Corrected 1896. Chromolithograph, 22” x 29.5” plus margins. CONDITION: Very good, faint toning and a few tiny separations along old folds. A map of Berkshire County, Massachusetts made for the Berkshire Life Insurance Company (est. 1851) of Pittsfield, Mass., intended to promote tourism in the area. Civil engineer Walter Watson first created this map in 1883. This second edition of 1896 differs from the earlier edition in that it is accompanied by a key in the upper-right corner identifying main roads, school houses, cemeteries, churches, and railroads stations. Other details include town boundaries, cities, villages, bodies of water, railroads (New York & Harlem R.R., Poughkeepsie, Hartford & Boston R.R., etc.), iron works, and the site of “Shays’ Fight,” that is, Shay’s Rebellion, the last action of which was fought in South Egremont in 1787. Relief depicting the region’s numerous hills and mountains is shown by hachure and spot heights, and a scale is provided below the title. Appearing in the margins are vignettes of the insurance company’s headquarters and a view of Greylock Peak (the highest peak in the state) as seen from Pittsfield’s Lake Onota. A note in the lower-right corner discusses how to reach the Berkshires via rail, and above this is a narrative description of the Berkshire Hills excerpted from “Taghconic” by J. E. A. Smith, part of which reads: “Its beauty is world renowned; for the pens of Bryant and Catherine Sedgwick early made it their favorite theme, and in later years Holmes and Longfellow, Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau have invested it with their genius.” Below the title is text on the Berkshire Life Insurance Co. The public is advised that the map is available from the insurance company or its agencies. An example of this map was included in the 2016 exhibition “From the Sea to the Mountains: The Trustees 125th Anniversary” at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. According to a note in the Harvard University Gazette, the map is “widely regarded as the first free road map ever distributed (by the Berkshire Life Insurance Company), mainly for touring bicyclists.” Walter Watson also produced Berkshire Hills Railways Highways & Villa Map (1886) and a map of Pittsfield that first appeared in the 1893 city Directory. OCLC records only one copy of this map (dated 1892), at the New York Public Library. Google searches locate copies of the 1896 edition at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center and Yale. REFERENCES: “Railway and highway map of the famous Berkshire Hills region, showing also villages and points of interest : from official records and other information” at Digital Commonwealth online; Rumsey 8016.
Item #7718
Price: $750.00
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