“While Stockbridge is becoming noted as a place of resort, and is made every year the theme of the poet, the painter, or the traveler, and the shrine even of the pilgrim, so poorly is the office of cicerone performed, that we are mortified to observe printed errors about localities, and are scarcely able, one of us, to direct visitors aright. Besides this, the genea-logical mania, as it is called, but better termed the fulfillment of that prophecy— ‘the righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance,’ is giving the public mind an interest in families, individuals, and places, not before felt.”
Such were the reasons Electa F. Jones undertook the writing of Stockbridge: Past and Present. “In arranging the materials for this work,” she wrote in 1854, “the aim has been, not merely to make it interesting as a book to be read, but convenient as a book of reference in after years."
