400 Years in a Very Small Place
Revise history any way you want but the story of the American character that build the country can be found in a few square miles on the Massachusetts coast.
Dogtown isn’t hard to find. The five square miles of woods, granite boulders and rocks lie on Cape Ann, just north of Boston, in Gloucester Massachusetts. For Americans currently siezed with revising their history, including taking down as well as putting up momuments to their current versions of the past, it’s an authentic record of the country’s 400 years that deserves remembering.
Signs to Dogtown are scarce but the city’s reservoir, compost pile, and a neighboring gun club mark the way. Don’t expect crowds with earphones on a curated walk. Except for the occasional all-terrain bicycler or odd jogger courting a fractured femur, its rough trails are often deserted. Like Ozymandius, the king of kings whose ruined strongman’s statue Shelly poetically submerged in the sands, under Dogtown’s oaks and beeches, scrub trees and brush cover its artifacts and what they have to tell.
Mother Nature’s reclamation of the real estate is part of the story. Home to the city’s resevoir, Gloucester has protected Dogtown’s watershed and woods, though not necessarily with an eye to preserving or even pointing out its tales. To its credit, the city has written up that past—from Dogtown’s primieval geology to the government’s current role—on an excellent site. But like most such histories the story’s arc begs for interpretation that chronologies, however well done, fail to give.
When it comes to Dogtown’s trajectory over four centuries, the facts are simple enough. Settled in 1623 when Cape Ann and the soon-to-be colonies saw their first arrivals, Dogtown’s original inhabitants and their successors fished, logged, grazed livestock, and farmed. By the end of the Revolutionary War, seafaring perils, conflict, and departures for better land and timber elsewhere took their toll on Dogtown’s male population. Cape Ann’s coastal towns and villages grew at the settlement’s expense.
As Dogtown’s able-bodied declined, widows and elderly peopled its dwindling housing stock, many keeping dogs for protection—hence the name decades later after their owners disappeared leaving the canines to fend for themselves. According to local lore, among the last of the lot, several witches (it was Massachusetts, after all) allegedly practiced their craft, begging, laying on extortionist curses, as well as in one case reportedly traveling by broom, while several ladies found the town proved convenient for entertaining menfolk to make ends meet.
When exactly Cape Ann’s residents reflected on Dogtown’s slide and said, “there goes the neighborhood,” is anybody’s guess. Only six of Dogtown’s 40 houses were occupied by the turn of the 19th Century. By the 1820s, the settlement was well into decay, a home for recluses and odd balls. Their final departures in 1845 left the woods to take over the remains: stone foundations surrounding cellar holes and stone fences outlining what had been commons, farming, or grazing land.
In the last hundred years or so, Dogtown has not been unappreciated. For example, Roger Babson, a local scion, successful financier, and college founder, donated the ajacent reservoir to the city, mapped Dogtown’s archeology, and enhanced its attractions. During the Depression, Babson paid Cape Ann’s unemployed stonecutters to carve two dozen inspirational inscriptions—think “Keep Out of Debt”—on Dogtown’s boulders. Corny or not, the homilies still sound better than “move fast and break things” and similar Silicon Valley drivel a century after Babson had them chiseled in stone.
Dogtown also has dodged several bullets. In the 1950s, plans to build a nuclear fuel processing facility threatened the location, as did the military’s consideration of the woods for an air defense site. Indeed, Gloucester’s citizens and city officials have worked hard to protect it from encroaching development, preserve its natural beauty, and ensure local school curricula help the next generation appreciate its place in history. In fact, on that score, even more could be done.
Dogtown’s story reflects a past—from the artifacts of its settlers 400 years ago to the efforts to preserve its natural beauty today—too often ignored. In an era when revisionist histories seek to highlight the contributions of unsung groups, repressed genders and causes, while cities and towns pull down monuments to a mythological past, its remains reveal more than the grist for an anthropologist’s monograph. They’re the tale of people who worked hard, succeeded or failed, and moved on.
Whether they prospered or not—for example, leaving a farm for a better one, a fisherman’s life, or a wilderness tract farther west—the lives of Dogtown’s settlers and their successors represent a quintessentially American story. More than a few fought in the Revolution and the War of 1812, but such service has never lacked for monuments. What’s missing, and what Dogtown’s four centuries reveal, is the evidence that they built their lives, and the country with a common perseverance.
The yeoman’s work done to preserve the seedbed of 400 years of history is a good start. Adding names and stories beside the cellars that mark its homes, fields and paths can tell far more, not only about the settlers, those who followed them, their labor and fate, but also about the story of what Americans share.