Charles Neville is playing New Orleans jazz on Edith Wharton’s terrace. Imagine a summer night, while his saxophone lifts its voice and children ran on the grass. A Grammy-winning musician, known around the world, is playing an informal concert in a garden — and he lives here, just a few miles away. 

In the Berkshires, many people and communities come together, like springs in the Housatonic. Nurses, community nonprofits, entrepreneurs and activists … Naturalists are hiking. Farmers are raising gotland sheep. We have families here who have worked in the mills for generations, and young locals have left for college and returned to open cafes or design websites.

People have come here from around the world. Families have traveled from Poland or Naples or County Antrim or Aleppo three or four generations ago, and from El Salvador and Ghana and more. And people have lived here, generation to generation, since before the Revolution — since Agrippa Hull and Elizabeth Freeman — and long before that, as Mohican families and Kanien ke’haka and Nipmuc and more lived here between the rivers, and still live here and return here.

Today people live and make and transform here, in many ways. Spoken word poets, bhangra dancers on a college stage, a young theater company singing Fun Home in a tavern — people celebrate who they are.

Berkshire people and communities