The wind whipped up Main Street in Stockbridge, Mass., making the rows of wooden rocking chairs lining the Red Lion Inn’s wide veranda sway gently. As I watched them, my imagination conjured another sunny afternoon 124 years earlier when the sculptor Daniel Chester French, of Lincoln Memorial fame, sat on that porch with his wife, Mary, and fell instantly and deeply under Stockbridge’s spell.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Mary told her husband. “But I am going to live here.”

I had only been in Stockbridge for a few hours, but with the Berkshires’ undulating hills rising all around me and the Red Lion Inn’s rocking chairs overlooking the idyllic downtown, I thought I understood why Mary didn’t want to leave this place.

If Stockbridge’s quaint, tree-lined Main Street seems like it’s plucked from a Norman Rockwell painting or an American folk song, that’s because it is. This tiny town (population 1,947) nestled in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts has had an outsize influence on American art. I was visiting because two of the town’s most important institutions — the Norman Rockwell Museum and Chesterwood , French’s summer home and studio — are both celebrating their 50th anniversaries this year.