You’d think the news that a chemical plant – and all that comes with it – might be built within bowshot of Wilbur and right smack dab in the middle of a State Forest watershed would unite the town like never before but in fact it split Wilbur right down the middle. Half the population was unemployed, partly unemployed, or underemployed. The other half thought their taxes were too high. Between the two groups, Don Nelson suddenly found allies he’d never had before. It was one thing to fight for a watershed area when you had nothing to gain from its destruction; it was something else when that destruction meant money in your own pocket and a decent living for the first time in many years.
Wilbur had been founded by Boston Brahmins in the late 19th century as a summer haven. For a brief time it flourished as a spa for the wealthy who built large summer homes, a two-story inn, and baths fed by the creeks that dotted Owl Mountain like needles on a porcupine. They began arriving in June, filled up the town in July, cooled themselves under their parasols in the August breezes, and abandoned it in a mass exodus the first week in September. Only a few years after they’d created it, one of them discovered Lenox and the following year Wilbur found it had been left to its own devices.
But its decline wasn’t to be as sudden as all that. When the wealthy moved out, the middle class moved in, and for another brief period Wilbur played host to bank managers, accountants, the owners of small stores, and even the occasional lawyer from Worcester. There were more of them than there had been of the rich and they spent more money, but they built nothing and left the town as they’d found it. Then they, too, moved on to the Berkshires and once again Wilbur was on its own.
For decades it survived – if only just – as a combination of a few hard-scrabble farms, a few summer visitors who bought the vacant summer mansions of the rich for a song and a fistful of beans, and a cheap bedroom community for Tully and Winslow. It didn’t know fiscal stability again until the 1950’s when the State bought the whole north slope of Owl Mountain and turned it into a State Forest for which it paid a sizable sum to the town every year.
This new-found wealth soon paid for a Town Hall, a Town Garage, and a combination Fire and Police Station, along with fire trucks (three), police cars (two), and snow plows (four). For the first time in their history they felt like an actual town and in an excess of pride and zeal they figured they ought to have a town government to prove it. Now they had a Board of Selectmen, a Town Moderator for the annual Town Meeting, and a part-time paid Town Secretary who acted as an aide for both.
In the 60’s, they suffered an influx of hippie and alternative types attracted by Wilbur’s remote beauty and cheap rents. Groups of them joined their meager incomes and took over the rest of the decaying mansions left behind by the Brahmins before World War I. Those houses needed a lot of work, most of which the newcomers weren’t competent to do, so they scoured New England for out-of-work carpenters, plumbers, and electricians to do it for them. Cheap.
The result was that by the 70’s a whole new Third Wave of emigrants had moved into Wilbur. This Third Wave were refugees from the city rat-race. They brought skills, tools, and a willingness to barter. They traded electrical work for wood stoves or food stamps, plumbing work for framing materials, or carpentry for junction boxes and wiring harnesses. They’d work for meals and some help building their own cabins in the woods, and it wasn’t long before dozens of rough, hand-hewn cabins could be found along every old logging road on the mountain.
Conservative old-timers whose families had lived in Wilbur for generations, since the days of the Cabots and Lodges, suddenly discovered that they were outnumbered by the liberal/radical left-wing newcomers. They panicked. They tried passing laws that would have condemned most of the new cabins but the cabin owners turned out in force and defeated them. Then they tried making the building codes stricter on the theory that if they could make buildings more expensive to construct the hippies would quit putting them up and find someplace else to go. That didn’t work either. The plethora of carpenters who’d been attracted by the plethora of work developed a positive genius for keeping the cabins up to code for 10 cents on the dollar.
