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Stockbridge, formerly known as Indian Town Plantation, was founded in 1739. It had no parent town.
[edit] Modern Stockbridge
Stockbridge is a town in Berkshire County in Western Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 2,018 at the 2020 census. A year-round resort area, Stockbridge is home to the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Austen Riggs Center (a psychiatric treatment center), and Chesterwood, home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French. [edit] History
Stockbridge was settled by British missionaries in 1734, who established it as a praying town for the Stockbridge Indians, an indigenous Mohican tribe. The township was set aside for the tribe by Massachusetts colonists as a reward for their assistance against the French in the French and Indian Wars. The Rev. John Sergeant, from Newark, New Jersey, was their first missionary. Sergeant was succeeded in this post by Jonathan Edwards, a Christian theologian associated with the First Great Awakening. First chartered as Indian Town in 1737, the village was incorporated on June 22, 1739 as Stockbridge. The missionaries named it after Stockbridge in Hampshire, England. Although the Massachusetts General Court had assured the Stockbridge Indians that their land would never be sold, the agreement was rescinded. Despite the aid by the Tribe to the American Patriots during the Revolutionary War, their lands in Stockbridge were stolen by white townspeople. The Tribe was forced to relocate west, first to New York and then to Wisconsin. The village was taken over by European American settlers. With the arrival of the railroad in 1850, Stockbridge developed as a summer resort for the wealthy of Boston and other major cities. Many large houses, called Berkshire Cottages, were built in the area before World War I and the advent of the income tax. Stockbridge was home to several cottages, including Naumkeag. Since 1853, Stockbridge has benefited from the presence of the Laurel Hill Association, a village beautification society. The Stockbridge Bowl Association maintains and preserves the natural beauty of Stockbridge Bowl and the surrounding Bullard Woods. Stockbridge was the home of Elizabeth Freeman, a freed slave, late in her life. The former slave engaged the attorney Theodore Sedgwick to file a freedom suit on her behalf, based on the statements in the new state constitution in 1780. In the case with a slave named Brom, the county court ruled that they were both free under the constitution. Their case served as precedent to a later case before the State Supreme Court, effectively ending slavery in Massachusetts. Freeman transferred as a free woman to work in the household of Sedgwick, who became a state judge. Also working in the household was Agrippa Hull, a free black veteran of the war, who became the largest black landowner in Stockbridge. Freeman was buried in the Sedgwick family plot at the Stockbridge Cemetery. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a daughter of Theodore and his wife, became a renowned 19th-century literary figure. She was born in Stockbridge in 1789. She is the author of six novels, including her most famous, Hope Leslie (1827). In the Curtisville area, now known as the Interlaken part of Stockbridge, Albrecht Pagenstecher, an immigrant from Saxony, established the first wood-based newsprint paper mill in the United States, in March 1867. Pagenstecher later went on to found "numerous pulp and paper mills throughout the Northeast and Canada" and serve on the Board of Directors of the International Paper Company. The town has a tradition as an art colony. The sculptor Daniel Chester French lived and worked at his home and studio called Chesterwood. Norman Rockwell painted many of his works in Stockbridge, which is now home to the Norman Rockwell Museum.
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