Local city information for Pittsfield, MA

Pittsfield is the largest city in and the county seat of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is the principal city of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Berkshire County. Its area code is 413. Its ZIP code is 01201 (01202 and 01203 are ZIP codes for Pittsfield post office boxes only). The population was 45,793 at the 2000 census, and it continues to be one of the population centers of Western Massachusetts, although the population has declined in recent decades.

In 2005, Farmers Insurance ranked Pittsfield 20th in the United States as “Most Secure Place To Live” among small towns with fewer than 150,000 residents. In 2006, Forbes ranked Pittsfield as number 61 in its list of Best Small Places for Business.
In 2008, Country Home Magazine ranked Pittsfield as #24 in a listing of "green cities" East of the Mississippi. In 2009, the City of Pittsfield was chosen to receive a 2009 Commonwealth Award, Massachusetts' highest award in the arts, humanities, and sciences.


Pittsfield and the surrounding area was originally inhabited by the Mohican (Muh-he-ka-neew) Native American tribe, an Algonquian people, until the early 1700’s.

In 1738, a wealthy Bostonian, Col. Jacob Wendell, bought 24,000 acres of lands known originally as Pontoosuck, a Mohican Indian word meaning “a field or haven for winter deer,” as a speculative investment, which he planned to subdivide and resell to others who would settle here. He formed a partnership with Philip Livingston, a wealthy kinsman from Albany, and Col. John Stoddard of Northampton, who already had claim to 1,000 acres here.

A group of young men came and began to clear the land in 1743, but threats of Indian raids associated with the conflict of the French and Indian War soon forced them to leave, and the land remained unoccupied by whites for several more years.

In 1752, the first settlers arrived, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Deming, from Wethersfield, CT. Mrs. Deming was the first white female to come to town, and she was often left alone at night by her husband's travels, the surrounding wilderness filled with Native Americans.

Soon, many others arrived from Westfield, Massachusetts, and a village began to grow, which was incorporated as Pontoosuck Plantation in 1753 by Solomon Deming, Simeon Crofoot, Stephen Crofoot, Charles Goodrich, Jacob Ensign, Samuel Taylor, and Elias Woodward. Mrs. Deming was both the first and the last of the original settlers, and she died in March, 1818 at the age of 92. Solomon Deming died in 1815 at the age of 96.

Pittsfield was officially incorporated in 1761. Royal Governor, Sir Francis Bernard named Pittsfield after British nobleman and politician William Pitt. By 1761 there were 200 residents and the plantation became the Township of Pittsfield.

By the end of the revolutionary war, Pittsfield had expanded to nearly 2,000 residents, including Colonel John Brown, who began accusing Benedict Arnold as a traitor in 1776, several years before Arnold defected to the British. Brown wrote in his winter 1776-77 handbill ''"Money is this man's God, and to get enough of it he would sacrifice his country".

While primarily an agricultural area, because of the many brooks that flowed into the Housatonic River, the landscape was dotted with mills that produced lumber, grist, paper and textiles. With the introduction of Merino sheep from Spain in 1807, the area became the center of woolen manufacturing in the United States, an industry that would dominate the community’s employment opportunities for almost a century.

The town was a bustling metropolis by the late 19th century. In 1891, the City of Pittsfield was incorporated, and William Stanley, who had recently relocated his Electric Manufacturing Company to Pittsfield from Great Barrington, produced the first electric transformer. Stanley’s enterprise was the forerunner of the internationally known corporate giant, General Electric (GE). Thanks to the success of GE, Pittsfield’s population in 1930 had grown to more than 50,000. While GE Advanced Materials (now owned by SABIC-Innovative Plastics) continues to be one of the City’s largest employers, a workforce that once topped 13,000 was reduced to less than 700 with the demise and/or relocation of the transformer and aerospace portions of the General Electric empire.

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