Category: Landmarks
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When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England. Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants. Colonists first learned about…
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My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is…
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In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and…
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Outside the store at Pine Hill Orchards No country experience satisfies like picking apples in the fall, especially when it’s followed by pies, soufflés, pancakes and every other sort of apple delight. In Charlemont we’re favored with four orchards in three nearby towns, Shelburne, Colrain, and Ashfield, and they all offer “Pick-Your-Own," from mid-September through late…
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We spent most of Saturday, June 20, celebrating Charlemont’s 250th birthday. State Representative Paul Mark and Senator Benjamin Downing presented the Town with a framed facsimile of its original charter, which the two men had paid to have restored. Five towns in Downing’s district had 250th birthdays this weekend, so the senator was busy. I…
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With 2013 so rife with docudramas that NPR’s Robert Siegel felt the need to fact-check them, we managed to see two more over the Christmas holidays, films in which the protagonists attempt to heal relationships long severed by time and space: Saving Mr. Banks at the Greenfield Garden Cinema and Philomena at Images, a small…
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Arthur A. Smith Bridge, Colrain, MA The Arthur A. Smith Bridge is accessible from Route 112 and Lyonsville Road in Colrain. Unless on foot, you’ll need to choose one way or the other to go in because the bridge, which spans the North River, is today open only to bicycles and foot traffic. Named…
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For the first time since we bought the house, we made what used to be our annual trek to Tanglewood. Armed with eggs (boiled) and cheese from Goat Rising and bread and muffins from the Country Store, we headed southwest to the music camp. Arriving around 10:30, we found a shady spot for the…
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A year that started out so hopefully for us in Charlemont, a new windmill and an old store turned 150, turned out to contain multiple weather disasters for Western Massachusetts with Hurricane Irene causing the most distress in the hilltowns. Avery's store c. 1880 The Mill Brook off…
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