Sheela Clary

Thanks to a fortuitous combination of good timing, generous residents, and federal aid allocated through the town of New Marlborough, Construct Inc. has closed on the twenty-acre Cassilis Farm located at 602-606 Hartsville-New Marlborough Road for roughly a third of the property’s original asking price. If all goes according to plan, the organization hopes to be welcoming local working people to 11 apartments in the 11-thousand-square-foot house and annex by 2025, and, before that, into two stand-alone homes on the property, all with the intention of maintaining the outward appearance of the historic property.

The September 27 closing was a year in the making and represents an unusual bit of good news on the local affordable housing front. The tale of the sale begins with Elizabeth Rosenberg, who’s both board president of Construct and chair of the New Marlborough Housing Committee and has had her eye on the affordability crisis ever since moving from New York twelve years ago. “It was so obvious in Manhattan how many homeless people there were,” she said. “When we moved up to the Berkshires and I got involved with Construct, I learned there are homeless up here, you just don’t see them on the corner. They either live in their car or couch surf or they’re camping in the woods. It just blew my mind that it’s everywhere that people can’t afford homes. What’s more important than having a home?”

Looking around, Rosenberg became alarmed by the dearth of options in her town of 1500 residents, so she and other concerned citizens started up the Housing Committee to work on solving the problem. Fellow committee member Kenzie Fields moved to New Marlborough at about the same time as Rosenberg and has found townspeople remarkably unified in finding solutions to what all agree is a pressing problem. “For us it was a question of looking around, figuring out what we could use.”

When Cassilis Farm came on the market in the spring of 2021 for $1.8 million, committee members took a look and thought it would be perfect. “It’s such a great property,” Rosenberg says. “I just fell in love with it and envisioned how it would be so great to have affordable housing there. We [Construct] raised some money to do a feasibility study. It looked like it was something that would work, so we made an offer.” That initial offer, of $1.2 million, was rejected, however, and so that golden opportunity appeared, for the moment, to have slipped from their grasp.

As with so many other super-sized single-family dwellings in Berkshire County, Cassilis Farm was born in the Gilded Age and, at least in elite equestrian circles, played quite a prominent role in it. The farm, along with the adjacent Mepal Manor, now the Center for Motivation and Change, formed part of what was once a 2,900-acre property established for the purpose of breeding hackney horses, as well as sheep and prize cocker spaniels.

The property’s origin story begins with one Hildreth Kennedy Bloodgood III, Wall Street banker, polo player, yachtsman, “member of the Knickerbocker, Racquet and Tennis, Westminster Kennel, Metropolitan, Union, and City Midday Clubs,” and son of an Alabama Confederate.

According to Will Regan, the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at CMC, Bloodgood, an outdoorsman who loved coming to the country for the hunting and fishing, bought the property “because he was traveling through England at some point in the 19th century, and he discovered these horses called Hackney ponies and became obsessed with them.” His passion led him to ship over 100 horses with which he established the Bloodgood Stock Farm.

His daughter, Mrs. J. Macy Willets, with her husband, had the house and annex built around the turn of the 20th century and into the following decades. Their horse breeding operation was run out of a small office that’s now the kitchen in the larger of the two free-standing homes behind the main complex.

The property passed down to a Willets granddaughter who had married into the Hill family, and in the late 1980s the Carpenter family of Great Barrington bought it from her. Mrs. Carpenter housed and educated developmentally disabled children and adults in the house for many years. One room still has a blackboard on the wall, and a closet still houses a dismantled crib. She passed away in 2017, and her sons and daughter sold the property in November 2020.

The new owner was David Baum, director of Dewey Academy, the small therapeutic high school which had been housed in Searles Castle in Great Barrington since 1985. He was hoping to make a new start for the school at Cassilis, but allegations of abuse, laid out in a Berkshire Eagle story that March, compelled Baum to abandon those plans. He said at the time that he hoped to bring about a complete “reboot” of the school elsewhere.

Just five months after acquiring it, Baum put Cassilis Farm on the market for $1.8 million. Construct’s initial bid last fall of $1.2 million went unaccepted, but the price was reduced several times over the following months when no other buyers emerged. This past July it was taken off the market, and in August the property was put up for sale at a public auction.

Rosenberg was among those in attendance that day. “I went with the head of Construct’s real estate committee [Mark Rosengren] and June Wolfe, the housing director, thinking maybe we’d be able to pick it up. There were about five people there, and three were actively bidding. It got to $600,000, incredibly low … We couldn’t believe it, so even though we really didn’t have the money in hand, I said to Mark, ‘Just bid. We’ll work it out.’ He bid $625000 and the other person bid $650,000.” They couldn’t see going any higher, so everyone assumed that would be the end of things.

But it turned out that the auction winners, says Jane Ralph, the Executive Director of Construct, got cold feet. “They’d gone inside the house and realized there was a lot more work to be done than they’d expected.” There’s a much longer story to tell of how private donations and 50 percent of New Marlborough’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds—allocated for the purpose of alleviating the harms exacerbated by the pandemic—were painstakingly gathered over many months so that Construct could acquire Cassilis. In the end, they got it for about half of what they’d first offered. Ralph is hoping interior work can begin in spring 2024, and tenants, selected by lottery, can move in sometime in 2025. Local residents and employees will be given preference in the form of two chances to everyone else’s one.

Jeff Carpenter, whose family had held the mortgage on Cassilis Farm after the sale to Dewey Academy, is thrilled that the property has gone to an organization whose mission is to help people, and also relieved to have it off his plate. “We took a pretty big loss,” he recalls. Aside from the enormous costs associated with heating and insuring the sprawling estate, their real estate taxes were assessed according to the book value of the property, which was far less than they could actually sell it for.

The Berkshire County housing crisis has become dire in recent years, exacerbated by the employment disruptions of the pandemic and a dramatic spike in real estate values. Despite progress on the affordable housing front, such as the Windrush Commons project south of Great Barrington currently underway under the auspices of the Community Development Corporation of South Berkshire, there are still more than 300 people on Construct’s waiting lists, with nearly 100 in Great Barrington alone.

“People think you’re housing ex-cons and people who don’t work,” says Wolfe. “There was a time when a majority of our applicants were single moms who were victims of domestic violence. But the crisis has really spread. Now it’s spreading to pretty much anyone who works.” The hospital is looking for housing for traveling nurses, builders are looking for carpenters and other tradespeople, restaurants are looking for cooks and waitstaff. “My dental hygienist moved to Cheshire because she couldn’t afford anything south,” she says. “Guess what? She found a job in Pittsfield. The workers have gone.”

For local business owners, population statistics for small towns like New Marlborough are sobering. A recent study commissioned by the housing committee and conducted by the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission found that the median age in town went from 48.9 in 2010 to 56 in 2018, the number of zero- to 19-year-olds went from 326 to just 189. By 2040, the town is projected to have just 95 residents under twenty. On the other end, in 2010 there were 299 New Marlborough residents 65 and older, by 2018 that number had grown to 404, and in 2040 there are projected to be 608.

CMC’s Will Regan asks, looking at these numbers, “Who’s going to take care of these people as they get older? Who’s going to provide workers for road crews, emergency services, the police department? You look at the volunteer fire department, and some of them are ten years older than me. The employees that we hire are having to live in Pittsfield or somewhere down in Connecticut or over in New York State. Those folks can’t volunteer in for the services. It’s just not reasonable.”

There’s a touch of irony in Bloodgood Stock Farm’s evolution from purebred propagation site to a big step in the direction of ensuring New Marlborough can once again be a socioeconomic and generational melting pot. With many other Gilded Age mansions in various states of disrepair around the county, perhaps others can find a second life to serve similar purposes. Jeff Carpenter is “delighted” by the outcome. “We so wanted it to go to somebody who would do good with it. This is what my mom would love. If she can hear us and see us now, she’s happy.”

Ralph and her staff, for their part, are excited and a little overwhelmed by the scale of the work to be done at Cassilis Farm. She’s also heartened by the successful collaboration that this purchase represents, and, hopefully, anticipates. “We have unanimous support from the Select Board, the planning board and just lots of grassroots community support … It’s a huge investment in ‘Yes In My Backyard.’”

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