Becket Center Historic District

Becket Center is a small rural district of about 40 acres in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, laid out along Route 8, Y.M.C.A. Road and Hamilton Road. It contains Georgian, Federal and Greek Revival farmhouses and civic buildings, an 1768 stone town pound, a 1760 parade ground, a cemetery begun in 1757, church horse sheds from 1802, and archaeological sites such as the first meeting house location. The center served as the political and spiritual heart of the town from the 1760s. When the Western Railway crossed the hills in 1841 and bypassed it, commerce shifted north to Becket Village and growth nearly stopped. No buildings were added after 1900. That sequence left an unusually complete example of an upland frontier settlement, valued more for how the buildings and sites relate than for individual architecture. Surface features also suggest buried foundations, wells and trash deposits that could add to knowledge of the town's past. Two YMCA camps later used the setting.