Students attended the school from Great Barrington, the villages of Housatonic, Van Deusenville and other communities in the southern Berkshire region.

In 2020, MVMS’s name was changed to DuBois Middle School The history of education in Great Barrington can be traced to a period before the American Revolutionary War in the mid-1700s.

Colonial settlers, highly valuing literacy, often supported a local schoolmaster with private donations or church sponsorship.

While an early sign of its commitment to education, it would be a century before the rural pioneer community could support a public high school.

Throughout the region one room school houses were opening, focused primarily on basic literacy skills.

It was the inherited fortune of Mary Sherwood Hopkins Searles, niece of the Kellogg sisters, that funded the widely admired new high school building constructed in 1898.

[1] Great Barrington's first public high school was established in 1868, occupying a temporary site until a year later when a new building was completed.

The three-story, Queen Anne design was considered to be grand in proportions, exceeding local expectations and receiving acclaim beyond the Berkshire region.

The building still stands today and has been the object of various reuse proposals, including that of a boutique hotel to serve the area's significant tourist trade.

The new school was built adjacent to “Olympian Field”, a venue for athletic events and an earlier gift to the community from Mr. Searles.

Student publications included The Climbing Ivy yearbook and Spectator literary magazine, published three times a year.

[7] For over a decade into the mid-1960s, Great Barrington explored consolidation with partners to the west and south, including Alford, Egremont, Mt.

[9] Economies of scale for rural districts and increasing student populations led to the closure of its high school, an outcome Great Barrington had debated for over a decade.

The conversion of the historic 1898 Queen Anne school building into a boutique hotel provoked intense controversy in the town.

The hotel proposal involves maintaining some internal structural elements, but models depict a fully transformed contemporary facade with no trace of the admired original Queen Anne design.