Mission House (Stockbridge, Massachusetts)  The Mission House is an historic house located at 19 Main Street, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was built between 1739 and 1742 by a Christian missionary to the local Mahicans. It is a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1968 as a rare surviving example of a colonial mission house. It is now owned and operated as a nonprofit museum by the Trustees of Reservations. The town of Stockbridge was established in the late 1730s as a mission community to the Mahicans. John Sergeant was the first missionary, formally beginning his service in 1735. His first house, built in the valley where the Indians lived, has not survived; this house was built in the white community on the hill above the town following his marriage in 1739. It remained in the Sergeant family until the 1870s, and survived Gilded Age developments of the late 19th century. In the 1920s the house was purchased by Mabel Choate, owner of the nearby Naumkeag estate, and moved down into the valley. She and landscape designer Fletcher Steele restored the building, furnished it with 18th century pieces, and designed gardens to Steele's vision of what a colonial landscape might have been. Choate opened the house as a museum in 1930, and donated it (and eventually Naumkeag as well) to the Trustees of Reservations, who operate both properties as museums. Before the arrival of British colonists, the area that is now southern Berkshire County, Massachusetts was inhabited by communities of the Mahican tribal confederation. The population of these communities changed over the 17th century as war (sometimes with European settlers and sometimes with the neighboring Iroquois), disease, and migration made them smaller and more diverse. By the 1720s they had sold off most of their tribal lands, and lived in relative peace in two remaining tracts of land on the Housatonic River. 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. This effort was managed in New England by a commission headed by the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Jonathan Belcher. 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. Funds were allocated for this effort in 1733. In 1734 Massachusetts residents in the Northampton area met to organize the mission.