Author Cornelia Gilder presents “Houses of the Berkshires” at the Sherborn Library

Event Description Provided By the Sherborn Library:

On Thursday, December 8^th at 7 p.m., Cornelia Brooke Gilder will present a slide lecture on the Berkshire “cottages.”  Built during the Gilded Age (1870-1930), these magnificent estates served as summer homes for wealthy industrialists and the country’s social elite.   Seeking respite from the city life of Boston and New York, families such as the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Morgans were also attracted to the bucolic Berkshires by its prestigious literary and artistic colony.

Commissioning the leading architects and landscape designers of the day, these families used their seemingly limitless wealth to build palatial mansions on sprawling estates. They transformed the Berkshire fields into rolling lawns and lush gardens, and entertained in a manner that earned Lenox and the surrounding area the title of "Inland Newport."

This slide lecture will include discussion of several Berkshire architecture and architects with two important local tie-ins.  Architect Guy Lowell designed Spring Lawn for shipping executive John Earnest Alexandre in Lenox.  Lowell is also the architect of a Sherborn home situated on Farm Pond (that was among the homes included in Friends House Tour several years ago).   Landscape architect James Frederick Dawson owned an estate on Ash Lane in Sherborn.  Dawson was a full partner in the famed Olmstead Brothers landscape design firm.  In the 1920s, he revived the grounds at Elm Court in Lenox, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Elm Court was the residence of William Douglas Sloane and Emily Vanderbilt Sloane.

Our speaker, Cornelia Gilder is the author of the book Houses of the Berkshires and spent most of her childhood in Lenox, Massachusetts in the house her grandparents bought in 1906. A graduate of Vassar College, she continued her graduate work at the Institute for Advanced Architectural Studies in York, England. She worked at the New York State Historic Preservation Office in Albany and has since contributed to a number of exhibits and publications, including A History of Ventfort Hall (Ventfort Hall Association, 2002), Hawthorne's Lenox (2008) and Architects in Albany (2010) She lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts, with her husband George.

This program is co-sponsored by the Sherborn Historical Society.  For additional information, contact Donna Bryant, Public Services Librarian, at 508.653.0770 or visit the Sherborn Library website at http://library.sherbornma.org.