87 Silverbrook Rd Sandisfield, MA 01255

The Rev. Edmund Sears grew up on a farm down the road in Sandisfield. He carried its sky with him. That sky gave us ''It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.'' Simon Winchester arrived 150 years later, trained his telescope on Saturn, and declared the stars were like ''diamonds on velvet.'' Eight books written here, a million words at least. c.1760 and 1840. 4 bedrooms, 3 baths. Library, keeping room with original crane fireplace, Aga kitchen, vaulted living room, screened-in porch. A c.1812 granary rebuilt as a writing studio with loft and full bath. Stone walls, orchard, meadow, vernal stream. 50 acres. 3/4 mile road frontage. Borders protected land. A serious Berkshire country property with a sky that still delivers. Offers in excess of $2,250,000 considered. Read the whole story. BARNHILL FARM 87 Silverbrook Road, Sandisfield, Massachusetts c.1760 and 1840 | 4 bedrooms, 3 baths | approximately 55 acres | 3/4 mile road frontage Offers in excess of $2,250,000 considered The Rev. Edmund Sears grew up on a farm just down the road in Sandisfield, working it with his hands through the Berkshire seasons, a poem always singing through his head. He left at twenty-one for Union College in Schenectady, then Harvard Divinity School, then answered the call to carry the gospel to the frontier settlements of Ohio, where the forests were still being cleared, the winters were brutal, and the nearest town was days away by horse. He was a young man from a quiet hillside in the Southern Berkshires doing serious work at the raw edge of the known world. But Sandisfield had been that world not eighty years before, when James Ayrault built the first house on this very farm. In 1760 this hillside was the frontier, as wild and remote as anything Sears would find in Ohio. He came back east eventually. Settled in Wayland, Massachusetts, as a Unitarian minister. And in 1849 he wrote a carol that has been sung every Christmas since. The sky it describes, full of stars and angels near the earth, was the sky of this corner of the Southern Berkshires, where the air is clean and the nights are dark and the hills rise toward heaven in a way that stays with you long after you have gone. That remove is not historical. It is still here. Sandisfield sits two and a half hours from New York, two from Boston, and feels like neither. In the winter of 2001, nearly 150 years later, shortly after his own purchase of the property, Simon Winchester stepped outside at three in the morning and pointed his telescope at Saturn. The air was bitter cold. The sky was moonless, and the stars looked, he said, like diamonds on velvet. He came in only when the dawn chorus was beginning. He found out only later that morning the intimate connection: five years after writing that carol, Edmund Sears's own brother, Joshua, had lived on this very farm. Winchester had already written more than 20 books, many of them bestsellers. Over the next quarter century at Barnhill Farm he would go on to write eight more (soon to be nine). All were written in 'his study' he had built specifically fit for purpose: a c.1812 granary he found in serious disrepair, restored and re-erected here in 2006. The Property and the Setting Barnhill Farm sits on approximately 60 acres along Silverbrook Road, a lightly traveled, town-maintained road in Sandisfield. 3/4 of a mile of the property's own frontage runs alongside it. Stone walls border the drive. The sign at the road reads Barnhill Farm. Below it, in smaller letters: The Sears-Hawley House. Two Birthdays The original structure on this land was built around 1760 by James Ayrault, whose family had acquired this lot in Sandisfield's first land division. In 1840 a new addition was built in the Greek Revival style. The entire property was restored with care and precision in 1985 by an old-house specialist, who set aside every salvageable original element, recreated missing plaster and molding by hand, refitted the foundation with quarried stone. Not a house mad