Itâs Black History Month, and while this column is about a white man he was, as you will see, an important influence on W.E.B. Du Boisâ post-high school education.
Charles Cornelius Coffin Painter (1833-1895) is an interesting figure from Great Barrington history. Townspeople saw little of him. Born in Draperâs Valley, Va., he attended Williams College and studied for the ministry and was ordained at the Congregational Church in New Marlborough in 1863.
He married Martha Gibson, of that town. In 1869, the couple relocated to Michigan where their son, Charles Fairbanks Painter, was born. By 1879, Painter came back to Great Barrington, parked his family in a home on Castle Street â and, with Thanksgiving and other irregular visits, variously took out-of-town positions with Fisk University, the Indians Rights Association and the American Missionary Association.
Great Barrington Long before Berkshire County was established in 1761, Native Americans made their home here. The Mohican Nation, an Algonquin Tribe, was the dominant Native American group along the Hudson River until disease and warfare (introduced by European settlers) decimated their numbers. The surviving members dispersed throughout the northeast, and one small group ultimately settled in the Berkshires, calling themselves the Housatonic Indians. In 1724, a pair of chiefs Konkapot and Umpachene sold the English enough land to form the towns of Great Barrington and Sheffield (a transaction that marks the start of white settlement in Berkshire County).
More than a century later, Charles Cornelius Coffin Painter (1833-89) was born. Painter, a clergyman turned reformer, was one of the foremost advocates and activists in the late-19th-century movement to reform United States Indian policy. Very few individuals possessed the influence Painter wielded in the movement, and Painte