Herman Melville’s Arrowhead

Guide was friendly and knowledgeable. Had an interesting and descriptive Tour. The price is a bit high given the short length of the tour.

Arrowhead is amazing! The tour guide we had was enthusiastic and very kind! You can tell he really loves his job. This is not your everyday run of the mill stuff society tour! Go and enjoy it!
The grounds are kept neat and in fall the chestnuts are covering the ground and the foliage is amazing! The house has the old wide wooden plank floor it’s pretty cool! There are some amazing pieces of antique furniture inside and the desk where moby dick was written has an outstanding view!

A quick but fun learning stop into the life and home of a famous writer, Herman Melville.
Arrowhead is now a non-​profit historic house museum operated by the Berkshire County Historical Society, which uses a portion of the house as office space. The remainder is open to the public for guided tours during the warmer months of the year. It is located at 780 Holmes Road, and is open from Memorial Day to Columbus Day.
Arrowhead, also known as the Herman Melville House, was the home of American author Herman Melville. In this house, Melville wrote some of his major work: the novels Moby-​Dick, Pierre (dedicated to nearby Mount Greylock), The Confidence-​Man, and Israel Potter; The Piazza Tales (a short story collection named for Arrowhead’s porch); and magazine stories such as «I and My Chimney».

I’ve visited a lot of author’s homes in my day, but I have to say that the tour we had of Arrowhead might have been the most thorough one I’ve ever taken. Our tour guide was the president of the group that owns and runs the Arrowhead Museum, and he is clearly passionate about his subject. I know so much more about Melville’s life and work for taking this tour, and I would encourage anyone, even if you’re only mildly interested to visit this house.
Arrowhead is a pretty modest place and Melville struggled to pay the bills when he lived there. At the time when we visited, and I’m not sure if this is a permanent exhibition or a rotating one, they had displays depicting the culture of the South Seas as covered by Melville in Omoo and Typee. I’ve never read more than Moby Dick and Bartleby the Scrivner, so it was fascinating to learn more about the culture he encountered on his travels, and how it influenced him.
The tour of the house was more about Melville raising his family, running the farm, writing Moby Dick and struggling financially. Amazing that today we speak of Moby Dick almost in hushed tones, and back then, no one wanted anything to do with it. I highly recommend Arrowhead to anyone who likes literature or history and I’m glad it’s preserved for future generations.

What always amazed me about Melville is that he wrote an epic tome like Moby Dick by, well, writing it out on paper. In the age before computers, this is where Melville worked in his second floor den on his gentleman’s farm that looked out over the mountains.
The house is very carefully restored. The tour was excellent and insightful. In the bosom of New England Melville ran his farm, not very seriously, and spent more money than he had, often importing his furnishings from New York. Apparently living beyond your means is more of a tale of the ages rather than just a lead up to the Great Recession.
Moby Dick? He sold fewer than 600 copies in his lifetime. Go and look around. You never learn less at these places and you can pick up a «Call me Ishmael» t-​shirt in the gift shop.

The former home of Herman Melville is one of the many gems in the Berkshires area of Massachusetts. This home screams of Melville, from its view of Mount Greylock to the fireplace inscribed with some of his prose to the very room where he composed «Moby-​Dick.»
Much of the home’s furnishings are original but I was more interested in Melville himself and his writing. The guide rushed us through, oftentimes not even waiting for all of us to get into the next room before she started talking. In fact, I purposely stayed behind in Melville’s office for a while; the rest of the group went downstairs. She didn’t seem to notice but I caught up anyway. Still, it’s a landmark of American literature so if you’re in the area, do drop in. The barn has a rotating exhibit space which was quite interesting (and quiet when we went in).