Bob Shepherd

Ventfort Hall, built by George and Sarah Morgan as their summer home, is an imposing Jacobean Revival mansion that typifies the Gilded Age in Lenox. Sarah, the sister of J. Pierpont Morgan, purchased the property in 1891, and hired Rotch & Tilden, prominent Boston architects, to design the house.

The town of Lenox was the center of the social season in the Berkshires during the Gilded Age, the period between the Civil War and the First World War. Drawn to the Berkshires by artists and writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Catherine Sedgwick, Fanny Kemble and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who had settled here early in the 19th century, as well as the beautiful countryside and scenic views of mountains and lakes, many prominent financiers and industrialists constructed luxurious and imposing summer homes in Lenox and the surrounding area.