City of Pittsfield ★ Massachusetts

On September 5, 1791, the Pittsfield town meeting voted an official ordinance to protect the windows of the newly erected First Congregational Meeting House on Park Square:

"Voted, that for the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House… no Person or Inhabitant of said Town, shall be permitted to play at any Game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Batball, Football, Catskinn, Fives, or any other Game with Balls, within eighty yards from said Meeting House."

Discovered in the town vault in 2004 by baseball historian John Thorn, this stands as the earliest authenticated printed and manuscript reference to baseball in North America!

In 1850, author Herman Melville moved his family to Arrowhead on Holmes Road in Pittsfield. Looking north from his second-floor study, the snow-covered ridge of Mount Greylock resembled a colossal white sperm whale breaching the mountainous Berkshire waves.

Here in Pittsfield, Melville wrote Moby-Dick (1851), forging a close friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived nearby in Lenox. The home is now preserved by the Berkshire County Historical Society.

In 1886, inventor William Stanley Jr. tested the world’s first practical alternating current (AC) transformer system right in Great Barrington, soon establishing the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company in Pittsfield.

Acquired by General Electric in 1903, Pittsfield became the global powerhouse of high-voltage transformer manufacturing, naval ordnance, and modern plastics engineering, employing over 13,000 Berkshire residents in its golden era.

Pittsfield is governed by a Mayor and an 11-member City Council (4 Councillors-at-Large and 7 Ward Councillors representing districts from Morningside to West Pittsfield).

The city is also the cultural heartbeat of Western Mass, home to the historic Colonial Theatre (built 1903), the Tony Award-winning Barrington Stage Company, the Berkshire Museum (founded by Zenas Crane in 1903), and scenic Wahconah Park—one of the last remaining wooden ballparks in the United States!