History of achievement

GREAT BARRINGTON -- Ninety-one-year-old Mae Brown was touring the 18th-century Sheffield home where a woman called Mumbet once was enslaved. In 1781, Mumbet took her owner, Colonel John Ashley, to court and became the first slave in Massachusetts to successfully sue for her freedom -- a case that contributed to the state's decision in 1783 to outlaw slavery.

Brown, a former Lenox High School teacher, said the case demonstrates a philosophy she learned as a child. ``I was taught that if they close the door on you, go in the window."

That's the spirit behind the new Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail to be unveiled this week, which celebrates the lives and accomplishments of African- Americans who made their mark in Western Massachusetts and beyond.

Trail organizers note that travelers to the Berkshires can visit the restored homes of authors Edith Wharton and Herman Melville, see the paintings of Norman Rockwell in a museum dedicated to him, or spend a night in one of the grand ``cottages" built by Lenox entrepreneurs. They can read about the contributions of white writers, musicians, dancers , and other local artists, business people, and more. But the achievements of the region's African- Americans have often been overlooked.

As Rachel Fletcher, a Great Barrington resident and co chairman of the heritage project, put it: ``To the extent that the Berkshires have a public face, the community has looked at it through white eyes."

For the past two years, Fletcher and an extended group of educators, church leaders, politicians, historians, other community activists, and longtime residents have been trying to correct this oversight. The result of their efforts can be found in a series of events that began last month and continue through October. The centerpiece is the creation of the heritage trail, which traces key events and locations in the history of the region's African-Americans, and the release this Thursday of a 250-page trail guide.

The heritage trail passes through 29 towns in the Upper Housatonic Valley from Kent, Conn., at its southern end to Lanesboro, in the north. It includes 34 principal sites, some open to the public and easily accessible, others undeveloped locations or private residences viewable only from a distance. They span the period from the first stirrings of the American Revolution until 1960.

Although African- Americans have always been a small proportion of the area's population -- never more than about 5 percent -- ``they created a very rich culture and heritage," said Frances Jones Sneed, a historian at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the other cochairman of the project.

The trail includes several sites connected to W.E.B. Du Bois, the early civil rights leader who was born and raised in Great Barrington; the Ashley home in Sheffield ; and the Pittsfield residence of the Rev. Samuel Harrison, chaplain of the 54th Massachusetts, the all-black regiment during the Civil War whose exploits were dramatized in the film ``Glory." Harrison advocated equal pay for all soldiers, regardless of race. It also includes the newer Lenox home of James VanDerZee, considered by many to be the 20th century's first great African- American photographer, and the summer residence and library in Great Barrington where NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson wrote his poetic masterpiece, ``God's Trombones."

Many of the trail sites are old churches where the congregations were predominantly black or cemeteries where blacks are buried, many in unmarked graves but others with interesting epitaphs. In the Stockbridge Cemetery, the prominent grave of Mumbet -- who took the name Elizabeth Freeman after she was freed -- states that she ``could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal."

One unusual aspect of the trail and guide is that they also tell the stories of many largely unknown characters and even fairly ordinary people who nonetheless had significant accomplishments. Elaine Gunn, a retired schoolteacher who is one of the authors of the guide, said these are people ``like the sisters who ran something like an 1800s laundromat from their home in Lenox, and a man who had a trash business there, who was like an early recycler. And a woman in Great Barrington had a tearoom and an employment agency and started an inn where black couples could go for their honeymoon. This was at a time when there weren't many places where they were welcome."

The inclusion of relatively ordinary people was important, Gunn added, ``because many of their descendants are still around and didn't know the stories of their own ancestors who were born and raised and worked and died right here. In school, we studied people who were famous, but we never learned who we were and how we got here."

Wray Gunn, Elaine Gunn's cousin-in-law and former president of the Sheffield Historical Society, added that many people now living in the valley ``are just one or two generations removed" from people mentioned in the guide and still know bits and pieces of their stories. ``If we didn't collect the information now, it could get lost," he said. ``So much of our history is oral history."

He is proud that his father, David Lester Gunn, the first black coach at a public school in the area, is included in the guide. He also enjoys the story of Warren Davis, a black real estate agent and lumberer responsible for more than 220 land transactions in the area, including the sale to the state of what became Beartown State Forest. A photo in the guide shows Davis standing in front of the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob's Pillow, where he cut some massive timbers by hand. He is holding an ax and wearing a suit and tie. ``He always looked very dapper," said Gunn, ``and he knew his trees."

To inaugurate the trail and guide, organizers have planned a series of events starting Thursday, all of them open to the public, including three bus tours highlighting sites along the trail, a gospel music concert, and a conference in North Adams intended to showcase the work of 20 teachers representing every public and private school in Berkshire County. With an 18-month grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the teachers have developed a classroom curriculum incorporating key features of the guide ``and designed to teach local African-American history through national and international history, as an organic part of it rather than an add-on," said Sneed.

Speaking about the heritage trail and guide, the Rev. Esther Dozier, of the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church in Great Barrington, voiced a view expressed by many. ``It's so great that we're finally putting names and faces on all these unknown people," she said. ``All these invisible people are becoming visible."

Clarence Gunn, Elaine Gunn's husband and a retired foreman with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, put it more simply. ``It's time," he said.

Contact Judith Gaines, a freelance writer in Maine, at gaines.judith@gmail.com.