About BROOK FARM INN

House History

The Story of Brook Farm Inn

Originally known as “The Burton Harrison House,” Brook Farm Inn began its life about a quarter mile from its current location. Built in 1882, it served as a rental cottage for a grand estate called The Hive. Both homes stood on a property that once stretched from Kemble Road to Old Stockbridge Road, commissioned for the German-born pianist Frederick William Rackeman and his wife, Elizabeth Dwight Sedwick Rackeman.

The first tenants were Burton N. Harrison and Constance Cary Harrison, a distinguished couple in their forties originally from Richmond, Virginia. Burton was a lawyer, politician, and former private secretary to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Captured with Davis at the end of the Civil War, Burton was imprisoned at Fort Delaware and released in 1866. After settling in New York City and establishing a successful law practice, he married his Richmond sweetheart, writer Constance Cary, in 1867.

Despite Burton’s Confederate past, the Harrisons became prominent members of New York society. Like many of their contemporaries, they escaped the city’s summer heat for the Berkshires, where they entertained an impressive circle of friends, including Emma Lazarus, Andrew and Louise Carnegie, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Constance—an accomplished novelist and playwright—often enlisted her guests to perform her plays in the library. In 1883, she chaired a major fundraising art exhibition to help finance the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, upon which Emma Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus was later inscribed in 1901.

At the turn of the century, the estate—including both The Hive and the Harrisons’ cottage—was sold to John E. Alexandre, who demolished The Hive and replaced it with Spring Lawn Mansion. In 1903, Alexandre gifted the smaller cottage to his butler, James Whittenham, who soon after purchased land on Hawthorne Street and relocated the house down the hill to its present site.

In 1914, Whittenham sold the property to Charles Bleyman, an upholsterer, for $2,800. Over the next few decades, the home changed hands several times until Lena and Max Rosenberg purchased it in 1949 and transformed it into an inn named The Shadowood. Lena’s culinary talents soon became legendary throughout the Berkshires. A 1950s newspaper feature on Tanglewood described her as the “virtuoso of the kitchen... unquestionably the Beethoven of the blintz.” A rare postcard from that era advertises rooms for $55 per week—or $10 per day.

In the 1970s, the property was purchased by Ruth Backes, a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been involved in the original Brook Farm utopian community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the 1840s. To honor that literary and philosophical legacy, Backes renamed the inn Brook Farm Inn.

Over the following decades, Brook Farm Inn continued to flourish under several caring innkeepers, including Frank and Mary Newton, Ann and Joe Miller, Betty and Bob Jacob, and Phil and Linda Halpern. The Jacobs, passionate lovers of literature and poetry, began a new literary chapter for the inn. They built an extensive library collection and invited acclaimed poets to stay and give readings. Pulitzer Prize–winning poets Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Stephen Dunn, and Robert Creeley all visited the inn and shared their work here.

Today, Brook Farm Inn is owned by Maureen Daury-Corcoran, a Pittsfield native, and her husband, Joe Corcoran, a landscaper and garden center owner. Maureen’s love of hospitality began in high school and college while working at Berkshire inns. She later attended the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts after meeting Joe at Syracuse University. Married in 1994, they lived in New Hampshire and the Boston area before returning to the Berkshires to raise their four children. While Joe expanded his landscaping business into Dr. Lahey’s Garden Center, Maureen taught culinary arts and catered throughout the region.

In 2021, the Corcorans fulfilled a lifelong dream by purchasing Brook Farm Inn—continuing its legacy of gracious hospitality, creativity, and history. Today, the inn proudly holds its place as Lenox’s top-rated Bed & Breakdast on TripAdvisor, welcoming guests with the same warmth, artistry, and charm that have defined it for nearly a century and a half.

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