How America's Millionaires Built a Paradise — Then Walked Away: The Berkshires

By 1899, Lenox, Massachusetts held more concentrated private fortune within its town limits than any town in America outside Newport, Rhode Island — a village New York's society pages nicknamed the "Inland Newport." Its year-round population sat under 3,000 people, yet Vanderbilt money, Morgan money, and Carnegie money financed more than seventy cottages across Lenox and Stockbridge, raised by families who controlled the nation's railroads, steel mills, and its largest private bank. But the splendor that built those cottages was seasonal by design, not built to last. Fewer than half of the more than seventy estates raised across Lenox and Stockbridge are still standing; the rest did not survive the century, lost to fire, foreclosure, and neglect once the fortunes moved on. Today the same hills hold a town of just over 5,000 people — barely above where it stood in 1900. One hillside above Stockbridge broke the pattern: over thirty years, Mabel Choate built not a ballroom for a single season but a garden designed to outlast one, its terraces still standing, still tended, still open to whoever climbs the hill. This is the story of how Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Carnegie fortunes built the Inland Newport — and how an architecture built for a single summer brought its golden age to an end. A full history documentary about Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts — from the Gilded Age heights of the Inland Newport to the gardens that outlasted them. Copyright & Fair Use Disclaimer • This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary created for commentary, criticism and research. • Some archival photos and footage are used under the principles of Fair Use (Section 107, U.S. Copyright Act) for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.