Berkshire National Fish Hatchery

Volunteers work to preserve indigenous fish habitats   By Michael Kelly It’s all about the water. At the Berkshire National Fish Hatchery (BNFH) in Hartsville, a hamlet of New Marlborough, Mass., 14 miles from Norfolk’s Village Green, 200 gallons a minute of pure 45-degree water from a deep underground aquifer course through 148 acres of […]

Berkshire Mountain Springs—From the Fountainhead to Your Door

By Michael Kelly The most direct way to access Berkshire County’s wealth of cultural amenities is to drive north on route 272, a felicitous, forested, rural byway. Just 4.5 miles from Norfolk’s village green, near the cutoff to Campbell Falls, you cross into Massachusetts and subconsciously absorb subtle, topographical changes. Two miles further up the […]

The Berkshire Rambler

Crane Paper Company: Seven Generations of Making Money   By Michael Kelly High quality paper has been an intrinsic part of the lives of the Crane family of Dalton, Mass. for almost 250 years. Stephen Crane started the business, making 100 percent cotton paper at the Liberty Mill in Milton, Mass., which Paul Revere printed […]

Melville, the Mountain and Moby Dick

  By Michael Kelly Only a writer with Herman Melville’s phantasmagorical imagination could look out his window in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts at Mount Greylock, 16 miles due north, and envision a great white whale surfacing for air in the remote seas of the South Pacific. Yet this is precisely what Melville did […]