Ice Glen

The Ice Glen is a ravine in the southeast area of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The park is essentially a lush, untended, romantic landscape consisting of piled rocks thick with mosses. Ice Glen derives its name from the fact that, ice can persist at the bottom of deep rock crevices there into the summer. Its north-south orientation protects the glen from much direct sunlight. Surrounding the glen is an old growth forest, rare in New England.

In 1891, the Ice Glen was donated by David Dudley Field to the Laurel Hill Association, the first incorporated village improvement society in the United States. As the association's existing property at Laurel Hill, which directly abuts the village center of Stockbridge, is separated from the forested hills in which the Ice Glen is located by the Housatonic River, the association built a bridge to connect the two properties. A trail still runs from Laurel Hill, behind the former Stockbridge Plain School, now the Town Offices building, over the bridge, through the glen, and exits on Ice Glen Road behind Villa Virginia.

Glen

A glen is a valley, typically one that is long, deep, and often glacially U-shaped, or one with a watercourse running through it. Whittow defines it as a "Scottish term for a deep valley in the Highlands" that is "narrower than a strath".

The word is Goidelic in origin: gleann in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, glion in Manx. In Manx, glan is also to be found meaning glen. It is cognate with Welsh glyn. The word is sometimes found in tautological placenames where its meaning was opaque to a new linguistic community, an example perhaps being Glendale (literally "valley valley") which is a combination of Norse "dale" and Gaelic "glen".

As the name of a river, it is thought to derive from the Irish word glan meaning clean, or the Welsh word gleindid meaning purity. An example is the Glens of Antrim in Northern Ireland where nine glens radiate out from the Antrim plateau to the sea along the coast between Ballycastle and Larne.

In the Finger Lakes Region of New York State, the southern ends of Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake in particular are etched with glens, although in this region the term "glen" refers most frequently to a narrow gorge, as opposed to a wider valley or strath. The steep hills surrounding these lakes are filled with loose shale from glacial moraines. This material has eroded over the past 10,000 years to produce rocky glens (e.g. Watkins Glen and Treman State Parks) and waterfalls (e.g., Taughannock Falls) as rainfall has descended toward the lakes below.

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Stockbridge is a town in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 1,947 at the 2010 census. A year-round resort area, Stockbridge is home to the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Austen Riggs Center (a noted psychiatric treatment center), and Chesterwood, home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French.

History

Stockbridge was first settled by English missionaries in 1734, who established it as a mission for the Mahican Indian tribe known as the Stockbridge Indians. The township was set aside for the tribe by English colonists as a reward for their assistance against the French in the French and Indian Wars. The Reverend John Sergeant from Newark, New Jersey, was their missionary. Sergeant was succeeded in this post by Jonathan Edwards, a notable Christian theologian associated with the First Great Awakening.

First chartered as Indian Town in 1737, the village was officially incorporated on June 22, 1739, as Stockbridge. The English colonists named it after Stockbridge in Hampshire, England.