North Adams, the old mill city at the foot of the mountains — birthplace of the giant art museum MASS MoCA and the eastern portal of the Hoosac Tunnel, the 'Bloody Pit.'
You've come down off the mountain into North Adams, and this scrappy little city in the valley has one of the great second acts in New England. For a hundred years this was a mill town — textiles, shoes, electronics — and when the factories closed, the biggest of the old mill complexes, a sprawling brick campus of twenty-some buildings, got turned into MASS MoCA, one of the largest contemporary art museums in the world. If modern art is your thing, it's right in town and worth a whole afternoon.
North Adams is also the gateway to one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in the nineteenth century — and one of the deadliest. Somewhere in the mountain the Trail crosses runs the Hoosac Tunnel, nearly five miles of railroad bored straight through solid rock, a project that took almost a quarter century and cost close to two hundred lives. They called it the Bloody Pit. Boone's got that story, and it's a chiller.
And if you've got a little time in town, there's a quiet geological marvel a short hop off the road: Natural Bridge State Park, where a brook has carved a graceful white arch clean through solid marble — the only naturally-formed marble bridge in all of North America, cut by the meltwater of the last Ice Age out of stone half a billion years old. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne came and stood on it back in 1838 and called it deep and strange and stern. It still is. Follow the signs if you want to see it.
From here the Mohawk Trail eases west along the valley floor toward Williamstown, with Mount Greylock looming to the south. It's a gentle valley run along here, between the high summits and Williamstown.
Photo: Booradley0212 · CC BY-SA 4.0
