Before the arrival of British colonists, the area that is now southern Berkshire County, Massachusetts was inhabited by communities of the Mahican tribal confederation.

[3] The population of these communities changed over the 17th century as war (sometimes with European colonists and sometimes with the neighboring Iroquois), disease, and migration made them smaller and more diverse.

[4] Beginning in the late 1720s the Mahicans became a point of interest to British missionary organizations, because they were seen as potential conversion targets and to counter the possibility of influence on them from Roman Catholic New France.

Belcher suggested in 1730 that the province lay out a town in the Mahican lands, and that London missionary groups pay for a mission there.

John Sergeant, a recent graduate of Yale College, agreed to take on the task, and spent some time that fall among the Mahicans.

[6] After negotiations involving Governor Belcher and Mahican leaders, it was agreed in 1735 that a mission would be established, and Sergeant was ordained to serve as a minister among them.

[8] In 1736 a township of six square miles (16 km2) was formally granted to the Mahicans by the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which would be incorporated in 1739 as Stockbridge.

[18] Sergeant's second house remained in the family until 1879, when the property was sold to David Dudley Field, Jr., a New York City lawyer.

Choate had in the 1930s convinced the elders of the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe (successors to the Mahicans) to sell her the Bible for display in the museum.

The layout of the house is a standard Georgian center-hall plan, with fireplaced rooms (a parlor to the left, and kitchen to the right) on either side of a central hall, which has a stairway to the second floor.

He drew on ideas seen in the gardens of George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon to design a property where "a hundred forms of industry were carried on".

[24] Rows of vegetables, fruit trees, and bushes, were lined with flowers for aesthetic appeal, and spaces for carved out that he envisioned would have been used for performing outdoor work such as chopping wood, churning butter, and preparing preserves.

[24] Echoing statements made in his Design of a Little Garden, published just a few years earlier, Steele laid out the outbuildings in such a way to provide the homeowners a private retreat.