By Adele Levine
Many long-time Becket residents can still rattle off the local names that once dotted our town, named for a family, a geographic feature, or an occupation rooted in a particular spot. “Charcoal City” was one of the best.
Native Becket resident Keith Tremblay remembers the name from his school days in the 1960s at Becket Consolidated School, where several of his classmates lived. Charcoal City ran along Bonny Rigg Hill Road, south of where Quarry and Algerie Roads meet.
As its name implies, the area once hummed with a thriving 19th-century charcoal industry. In the traditional method, workers stacked large quantities of hardwood into a cone, sealed it with earth, leaves, or ash, and set it smoldering slowly with barely a breath of oxygen until it transformed into charcoal. By the late 1800s, towering brick kilns had taken over the job, circular giants standing 30-feet high and 30-feet across, each burning through 80 cords of wood at a time. Feeding that appetite meant clearing roughly 330 acres of forest every single year. In the end one cord of wood burned down to about 30 bushels of charcoal.
That charcoal stoked local iron furnaces and later powered the granite industry, including the Becket Quarry. But by the early 1900s, the hardwoods that fed the kilns had been decimated, and cheaper mineral coal was easy to come by. The industry had enjoyed a long run, but by 1920 the kilns stood in ruins. Even the bricks didn’t survive. They were hauled away, along with the soil beneath them, to serve as fill for the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Local history holds that Becket charcoal was so prized that during the boom years of the 1880s, it was hauled over mountain roads to Chester by heavy horse-drawn wagons and later by steam- powered freight trains, after a rail spur linked Chester to the Becket Quarry. From there, it rode by rail to major cities, and, so the story goes, even overseas.
Charcoal City, the industry, eventually shut down, but Charcoal City, the neighborhood lived on, home to some of Tremblay’s old classmates. For Tremblay, the name never lost its pull. Years later, when he launched a barbecue catering business, there was really only one name that would do: Charcoal City Barbecue. “When I started my catering business, I cooked with wood and charcoal,” Tremblay recalls. “I wanted a great name and remembered that part of town.”
The kilns are long gone, and the industry that gave the area its name has faded from most people’s memory, but the name itself refuses to fade. The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has officially designated Charcoal City an archaic neighborhood of Becket—a small but permanent piece of local history, and there it will always remain.
Special thanks to Faith Bailey, head of circulation at the Becket Athenaeum for her guiding the BB to relevant sources, including Becket, Massachusetts: From Colonial Township to Modern Town 1765-2015 and A Bicentennial History of Becket, Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
