2. Lenox
The plot of land on which the small village of Lenox sits today was purchased in the mid-1700s by a settler named Josiah Dean and cost only £2,250, but the earliest white visitors to the area thought the place was too wild and rugged for human settlement.
A slew of important Americans resided in Lenox during the past few centuries including writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and actress Maureen Stapleton. Lenox sits among the beautiful Berkshire mountains and is a popular tourist destination for summer travelers.
The Lenox Chamber of Commerce lists several popular activities for residents and visitors like horseback riding, the Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum, and the Berkshire Theatre Group.
According to USA statistics website, the population of Lenox sits at a small 1,675, according to census numbers from 2010. The number of people living in Lenox has remained fairly constant over the years. Real estate in the area hasn’t remained constant; however, and prices of homes after the close of the recession tore up the charts well into the million dollar range.
The average price of properties sold in Lenox, according to real estate site Trulia, was $359,658 for the first part of 2014, but the average listing price of homes was nearly $800,000.
However, families or couples who do decide to come to Lenox get to enjoy a lovely climate with statistics from The Weather Channel suggesting temperatures barely reach into the lower 80s during the summer and sit in the 30s during the winter.
Although the lengthy winter of 2013/2014 was an outlier, the weather in Lenox has traditionally been quite pleasant all year long with dustings of snow in the winter and warm, sunny weather in the summer. In the past few decades, Lenox has undergone expansion to accommodate more tourism and has made attempts to retain the beauty and historic nature of the town’s tiny main street district.
