Williamstown, Massachusetts : ‘A Village Beautiful’ : That’s What Locals Call This Historic New England Town, Where the Fall Leaf Show Will Soon Begin

Come stomping into this town looking for trouble, I dare you. The Berkshire hills will roll pleasantly beneath you, Mt. Greylock will rise gently on the horizon and the landscapewill enfold you in springtime greens, winter-white flocking or, now that fall approaches, a super-saturated leaf scene of reds and oranges. Steeples, porches, red bricks, Colonial columns and clapboard walls will arrange themselves around you. The streets will be neat, the lawns trimmed, the 90-odd buildings of Williams College handsomely historic.

You can’t even count on the students for disorder. During my three-night visit to this northwestern corner of Massachusetts last spring, I hiked out to the college’s Cole Field and watched the graceful and fierce women of the Middlebury College lacrosse team destroy ateam of Williams women, 16-7. After the clock ran out, the vanquished Williams women lay down their sticks, gathered in a circle and raised their voices. Here it comes, I thought, a little enmity, a little nastiness, a little . . .

“Nice game, Middlebury!” they chanted. “Good job, officials! Good luck, J.V.!”

Good job, officials!? So goes life in Billsville, as its roughly 8,400 residents sometimes refer to it. The energy and menace of Manhattan lie just 155 miles to the south, and the traffic-packed side streets and dense neighborhoods of Boston boil about 140 miles to the east. Williamstown endures at a point three hours’ drive from each--culture and nature its twin themes, its commercial core occupying a single city block.

To travelers from west of the Mississippi, Williamstown remains largely unknown, and is easily confused with Williamsburg, another town dating back to Colonial days. (For the record, Williams burg is a Virginia village near Washington, D.C. Williams town stands four states northeast of there, in the northwest corner of Massachusetts.)

To travelers from the east, Williamstown is a well-known retreat. Some roll in for a few days of fall foliage admiration--a normally spectacular show that has the added advantage of being off more crowded leaf-peeper routes--or for visits to the community’s pair of top-flight art museums, or for summertime music at nearby Tanglewood. (Though Tanglewood--a 200-acre estate in Lenox--is best known as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and music director Seiji Ozawa, its schedule this year in a new concert hall included Frank Sinatra, Raffi, Wynton Marsalis and James Taylor.)

The main performing arts attraction in Williamstown proper is the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a 40-year-old series of summer productions headquartered behind the white columns and red brick walls of Williams College’s Adams Memorial Theater. Since 1959, when playwright Thornton Wilder played the stage manager in a production here of his own “Our Town,” the festival has commanded great attention from New York theater folk and now draws about 50,000 playgoers each summer, about 90% of them from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The past summer’s program of 10 productions at three sites included Julie Harris, James Whitmore (who played the stage manager in a revival of “Our Town”), Blythe Danner, Christopher Walken, Christopher Reeve, Paxton Whitehead, Stephanie Powers, Robert Wagner, Richard Benjamin, Stockard Channing, Julie Hagerty, Helen Hunt, Maureen O’Sullivan and Richard Thomas. The season runs from late June to late August. Tickets usually go on sale in early June, run $11-$30 for most shows and sell out quickly.

Workaday Williamstown is impressive too, largely for its lack of real-life drama. In the town’s last annual report, which covered the year ended June 30, 1992, Williamstown’s various local agencies logged just one case of vehicular homicide and 17 cases of assault and battery, against 39,388 library books circulated, 1,144 hunting and fishing permits issued, 30 reports of barking dogs, six stray cats and one raccoon tested for rabies. (The paperwork came back negative.)

With such high culture, low crime and splendid scenery around, Williamstown has grown a bit proud of itself. Though Williamstown is essentially contiguous with the down-at-the-heels, blue-collar burg of North Adams, white-collar Williamstown people seem to view that town at the other end of Main Street as merely a distant acquaintance. The official Williamstown motto, inscribed boldly on a white sign at the end of Spring Street, is “the Village Beautiful.”

It’s true, the village is beautiful; even the Mobil station is a handsome brick building. But if all this civic pride gets difficult to take, a cynical city visitor can find some comfort in local history: Williamstown owes its distinguished existence to an old soldier’s well-founded pessimism, and if the world were only a slightly different place, city boosters today would be begging drama critics to please come see the West Hoosuck Theatre Festival.

In 1755, a wealthy Yankee colonel named Ephraim Williams Jr., doubtfully facing a campaign against French and Indian troops, was inspired to update his will. In the updated document, Williams earmarked funds for establishment of a town and a “free school” west of Fort Massachusetts, but only if those enterprises would bear his name.

Sure enough, the colonel was killed in battle a month later. By 1791, the township of Williamstown (formerly known as West Hoosuck) had been incorporated and the Williamstown Free School was newly established.

Strangers may notice that the university cites 1793, not 1791, as its founding date. It was 1793 when Massachusetts judicial officials approved the conversion of the school into a college, thereby advancing the cause of higher education and laying the groundwork for the assessing of tuition fees. Thus private Williams College, former free school, is now able to charge its students 1994-95 tuition and room-and-board fees of $25,560.

But why dwell on footnotes when so much history stands here so tangibly? In the center of town, most of the oldest buildings belong to Williams College, which serves its 2,000 students on 450 acres. On Main Street alone, the college offers up the stolid gray tower of Thompson Memorial Chapel (1903), the piercing white steeple of the First Congregational Church (1869), the white columns of Chapin Hall (1912) and Adams Memorial Theater, and the red bricks and white clapboard of just about everything else. On the same street, the city’s public library sits in an 1815 building and, a few blocks west of the main drag, the city’s first burial ground occupies a hillside. Westlawn Cemetery, home to scores of 18th- and 19th-Century gravestones, sprawls above a broad view of the town and distant hills.

The logical place to sleep in such a town is someplace drenched in tradition, and there are many options. Beginning in the middle of town with the Colonial Williams Inn and radiating out into the hills, there are more than 30 hotels, motels, inns and bed and breakfastoperations in greater Williamstown, most of them assembled with traditional New England architectural sensibilities. At least three Victorian B&Bs; date to the 19th Century. I admired them all, and might well seek them out on another trip, but this time I stayed away.

Instead, I lodged at Field Farm, a strikingly modern home on a 254-acre farm about six miles outside town. It’s a fascinating structure, full of picture windows, stark planes, rakish angles, blondish woods and modern art. Outside is a tennis court on one side and a big pond on the other. With its metallic door handles and window frames, the house seems very efficient, forward-thinking and respectful of nature, the kind of place Frank Lloyd Wright would put up next to Walden Pond.

In fact, the architect’s name was Edward Gooddell,and the home’s five bedrooms, each with private bath, are unusually expensive to heat.

The home began in 1948 as a residence for millionaire, art collector, furniture maker and Williams College alumnus Lawrence H. Bloedel and his wife, Eleanor. But in 1984, the Bloedels donated the home, its custom furniture and the surrounding acreage to the Trustees of Reservations, a Massachusetts nonprofit land-preservation group. Then it stood idle for a few years, while hands were wrung.

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Finally, local innkeepers Dave and Judy Loomis volunteered to take over the building and operate it for the organization as a five-room guest house. The trustees said yes, and Field Farm has now been a guest house for seven years.

Rooms run $90 nightly and breakfast is included. If you’re willing to do without a phone in your room or free shampoo, it’s a great opportunity to wake up in a sort of hypothetical 21st-Century room and look out over an old New England landscape.

During my visit in May, the cold wind rippled the pond, and every morning a grove of densely grown trees stood dew-soaked and surging with spring sap. In fall, the picture windows frame vast expanses of leafy red, oranges and yellows. On my second morning at the farm, I got a specialist’s perspective on the trees, the sap and the dew.

Three other guests had come to town from the Boston area for a wildflower walk, and one of them was Russell Cohen, a spectacled, bearded, pony-tailed lecturer on edible plants. He was a big fan of the flora around Williamstown, he said. Then he ticked off a long list of flowers commonly found in the area, describing their looks and assessing their edibility.

Some, he said, would be tasty on toast; others were poisonous when eaten raw but harmless after a boiling or two. Since I wasn’t confident in my ability to remember which was which, I refrained from snacking during my hikes across farmlands and into the hills. The view, the woodsy sounds and the clear air were enough. Besides, I had this further observation of Cohen’s to comfort me:

“You know how all of these wild meats, like rattlesnake, taste like chicken? Well, wild plants tend to taste like spinach.”

Onward, then, to urban and indoor Williamstown.

Spring Street, the town’s principal shopping street, is lined with two-story buildings and handsome storefronts. There’s a post office, an antique store, a college casual-wear shop, a pizza place, Pappa Charlie’s sandwich shop, a pottery shop, the Berkshire Hills Market, sporting goods and stationery stores, a coffeehouse. Set back from the street, on Bank Street, is the Purple Pub, a student hangout. A block east on Water Street is Water Street Books, the best bookstore in town.

Midway between Spring and Water streets stands the neo-Colonial Williams College Museum of Art, whose collection is strong on American art of this century. (Admission is free.)

But the most prominent museum in town is the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, a short drive from the campus and Spring Street area.

The Clark, also free, was founded in 1955, thanks largely to family funds that came from the Singer sewing machine fortune. The museum’s collection, much of it acquired in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s by Robert Sterling Clark for his own enjoyment, is dominated by French Impressionists, including more than 30 Renoirs and some Degas, although works from Americans John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer are on hand as well.

Among the campus buildings, one of the most popular with visitors is the Chapin Library of Rare Books, where I found a white-haired man in conversation with a librarian amid marble flooring and elaborate wooden shelving.

If I eavesdropped accurately, he was a 1933 Williams alumnus, contemplating a bequest and troubled by the fact that kids today don’t seem to know who Paul Whiteman was. (Paul Whiteman: New York-based band leader, jazz pioneer, commissioner of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and donor of scores, recordings and other memorabilia to the Williams College library’s special collections department.)

The Chapin Library’s main attraction is its collection of Revolutionary-era documents, including a 1776 printed version of the Declaration of Independence, a 1777 copy of the Articles of Confederation and Union, a 1789 draft version of the Bill of Rights, George Washington’s copy of the Federalist Papers and, my favorite, a 1787 letter in which Virginia Constitutional Convention delegate George Mason complains vigorously about “fatal” flaws in the newly drafted U.S. Constitution.

By Mason’s reading, the Constitution gave too little power to the president, created an unnecessary executive office (the vice presidency), failed to preserve liberty of the press, gave too much power to the Senate (allowing senators “to accomplish what usurpations they please upon the rights and liberty of the people”) and too much power to the judiciary (“enabling the rich to oppress & ruin the poor”).

A government based on such a document, Mason warned, could “produce a monarchy, or a corrupt tyrannical aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.”

Later the Bill of Rights came along and dealt with some of Mason’s complaints, but many of them have gone unanswered.

In fact, the best measure of Williamstown’s pleasant and becalming nature may be this: Even with all that goes on these days in the world beyond Williamstown’s boundaries, it is possible to step out of the Chapin Library into a sunny day, look out at this orderly land of trees and hillocks and steeples and well-scrubbed undergraduates, and decide that George Mason was probably wrong.

GUIDEBOOK

A Quaint, Quiet Corner of Massachusetts

Getting there: Williamstown lies about 155 miles northeast of New York City and about 140 miles west of Boston. The nearest airport is in Albany, N.Y., 45 miles west. The drive from New York (via Taconic State Parkway, Route 295 East, Route 22 north, Route 43 east and Route 7 north) or Boston (via Route 2 all the way, or via the Massachusetts Turnpike to Route 20 west and Route 7 north) takes about three hours.

Where to stay: During summer theater and fall foliage seasons, reservations are vital. I stayed at Field Farm Guest House (554 Sloan Road, Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-3135), a five-bedroom modern house overlooking a pond amid 254 preserved rural acres. Each room has private bath and three have upstairs balconies. Six miles outside of town. All rooms $90 nightly. No credit cards.

The Orchards (222 Adams Road, Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 800-225-1517 or 413-458-9611) is the fanciest hotel and restaurant in town, oddly located amid strip malls along the main drag. Lots of dark paneling in public rooms and 49 rooms around a manicured garden courtyard. Standard double rooms: $120-$150.

The Williams Inn (480 Main St., Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-9371) is a short walk from most campus buildings, includes restaurant, indoor swimming pool, 100 rooms and seems child-friendly. Double rooms: $100-$145.

Among more affordable lodgings, the Maple Terrace Motel (555 Main St., Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-9677) is clean and convenient. Double rooms $44-$83, depending on the season. A bed and breakfast, The House on Main Street (1120 Main St., Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-3031), offers rooms in a residence dating to the 18th Century. Three rooms with private baths, three that share. Double rooms: $65-$85.

Where to eat: Hobson’s Choice (159 Water St., Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-9101). Seafood emphasis, several dishes served blackened (in Southern style) and three vegetarian entrees. Dinner main courses: $9-$13.

Robin’s (117 Spring St., Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-4489). Nouvelle American, located at the end of town’s main shopping block. Dinner entrees: $15-$19.

For light meals, The Store at Five Corners (junction of Routes 7 and 43, Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-3176) in South Williamstown sells fancy foods but keeps its in-house menu under $6. On the shopping block of Spring Street, Pappa Charlie’s (28 Spring St., Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-5969) draws a heavy student crowd (lunch prices under $4).

For more information: Williamstown Board of Trade, P.O. Box 357, Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. 413-458-9077). Williamstown Theatre Festival (P.O. Box 517, Williamstown, Mass. 01267; tel. for tickets 413-597-3400; year-round office, 413-458-3200).