A Simple Book Carved in Stone

Pamela Mansfield 

It’s rare that you’ll run into another human being in Dogtown.  Though its rocky footpaths and ancient roads -- some dating back three hundred years -- are easy to follow, the blueberries plump, and the craggy terrain intriguing, it seems when you are in these woods as though all civilization has vanished.

Vanished but not forgotten.  Not here in desolate Dogtown where the early setters who came to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the late 1600s to fish and farm cleared the rocky land for pasture and tried to cultivate the soil.  Failing to scratch a living from such an unlikely spot, the menfolk returned to cultivating the sea, where Gloucestermen have gone to earn their livelihood – and sometimes met their untimely end -- ever since.  In their wake they left their wives and families behind under the protection of guard dogs, from which the community eventually got its name. 

As Dogtown’s sixty houses were deserted one by one, only widows, spinsters, and a few aging men stayed behind with the dogs.  People living in town, near the busy fisheries and shore, no doubt nodded and winked at each other when they referred to the tenacious inhabitants of this failed community, for the reclusive women were thought to be either crazy or witches who could cast spells.  Anyone passing by Tammy Younger’s house was subjected to a tirade of insults, and only by giving her food or aid could one safely continue on.  Granny Day, whose name was given to a swamp that swallowed wandering sheep, was another straggler who ended her days in this forlorn place.

The last of the Dogtown residents died in the early 1800s.  Gloucester historian John Babson recorded in his book published less than fifty years later that the last inhabitant, Abraham Wharf, crawled under a rock in 1814 where he “sought relief from poverty, and the accumulated sorrows of more than threescore and ten years, by putting an end to his existence.”

It is an eerie, almost other worldly feeling one gets walking here, especially when the wooded pathways open to the dry, grassy spaces where a carved granite post marks the site where some swaggering villager fought a bull on a bet and was gored to death.  This is Dog Town Square, so named by the ghosts of this village long ago.  It is identified by a boulder carved with the letters D.T.SQ.  Such natural markers are everywhere, for granite abounds -- huge boulders raked up long ago by the glacier that left a terminal moraine and oddly shaped outcroppings in its path. It carved one such outcropping, aptly named Whale’s Jaw, into the shape of the head of a whale poking up from the sea, its giant mouth open to catch sustenance from the sky above it.

I never come to Dogtown alone. Its three thousand acres are terribly remote although just outside the edge of the woods is a busy community of more than thirty thousand people.  Dogtown has a reputation for attracting unsavory characters, including one about ten years ago who stepped out of the woods and crushed a woman’s skull with a rock.  It is a wild, untamed part of the town I have called home for most of my life.  A vast green jewel in the heart of picturesque Cape Ann, thirty miles north of Boston, the town lines of Gloucester and the more resort-like tourist town of Rockport pass through it.  It remains a silent testament, however, to what this country must have looked like generations ago.

Just about everyone I know has picked blueberries here in July and August as a child or knows about the crumbling cellar holes of the ancient houses that once flanked Dogtown Common.  It must seem peculiar, though, to visitors who venture here and walk past boulders carved in relief with numbers to mark the cellar holes.  Even more odd are the boulders engraved in capital letters with sayings that admonish the passerby to “GET A JOB,”  “HELP MOTHER,” or “BE ON TIME.”  Some residents know the origin of these old carvings, but many do not.

I never knew much beyond the folklore of Dogtown myself, until one Earth Day a few years ago.  The high tech company I worked for, housed in a 200,000 square foot facility firmly anchored in the industrial park that abuts the woods and located just steps from the ancient hamlet, chose this annual celebration to return a crucial piece of land to Dogtown.  As the company’s marketing writer and a member of the Environmental Team, I was writing a newsletter explaining to the other twelve hundred employees the significance of our land grant.  I wanted to weave in some of the historical as well as ecological importance of the area. 

During the Environmental Team meetings to plan the Earth Day celebration, I met members of Gloucester’s ad hoc Watershed Committee, including the colorful Joe Orange and long-time activist Carolyn O’Connor.  They were elated about the grant and hovered over the land during its transfer, guarding the entrance and helping to plant trees on what had been a lifeless roadbed.  They shared their dogged enthusiasm for the unique interior of our community with me, and I filled in more history on my own with the help of some dusty old books and a couple of recent trail maps.  Slowly the story of this abandoned community came into focus.

The land grant settled a nearly twenty-year dispute about a planned roadway that would have sliced through Dogtown and connected to yet another industrial park.  Part of the dispute had to do with disrupting this historic area, while the other part had to do with the threat to the fragility of the half-million square feet of land.  The path to expansion could have scratched a swath into the watershed and threatened land so fragile that the main source of Gloucester’s drinking water, Babson Reservoir, located just down the hill through the woods, would suffer.  The roadbed had already been dug back in 1979, but by the late 1990s further work remained stalled.  The dirt road had lain hidden between a large vernal pond and the Dogtown woods.  A mound of dirt dumped  at the entrance concealed its controversial secrets.  While waiting for further development, the area silently bore the assaults of illegal dumping and forbidden dirt bikes, which tore their way through the old roads in Dogtown.

The dirt bikes were not only desecrating the land, they were noisily intruding on a spot that is almost sacred. Throughout Gloucester’s history Dogtown has been spoken of the way one would speak of a crazy great-great aunt once locked upstairs in an attic.  It has inspired paintings of its rugged landscape and poems about its mysteries.  To commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the town, one unnamed resident wrote these verses in the “Historical Poem to the Sons of Old Cape Ann”:

A mile or two back from the shore

There is a lonely spot,

Called “Dog Town,” in the days of yore,

Where each abandoned lot

Makes mute appeal – with feelings strange

And with soft voice and step

Over the hills we slowly range.

We’re told, in early days

When pirates roved the stormy seas

The fishermen were wont

To leave their loved ones hid behind

The rock surmounted hills

In safe seclusion, guarded strong

Each by a faithful dog.

Only the empty cellars now

Remain to tell the tale.

Where once was life, can now be found

But rocks and vacant swale.

‘Tis said, that on bright moonlight nights

Weird spirits stalk about

And point their shadowy arms to sea,

But that most people doubt.

This though is true beyond dispute,

From those rough rocky heights

Where the great “Whale’s Jaw” lifts its head

Up to the sky, are found

Grand views of the vast ocean wide

That girds the earth around.

Gloucester’s poet laureat, Charles Olson, wrote of Dogtown in the Maximus Poems.  Marsden Hartley, an American modern painter and member of the avant-garde movement in the early 1900s, captured it in oil paintings and in poetry.  The first book written about the area appeared in 1826, when local newspaper reporter Charles E. Mann became caught up in its history and was compelled to capture it for all time.  Since then, several guidebooks have been published, including one by the Appalachian Mountain Club entitled “More Country Walks Near Boston.”  The author describes this curious area bordered by sprawl in a picturesque way:

“America’s Technology Highway – Route 128 – fizzles out within a stone’s throw of the 17^th century, near a place where Lear’s mad scene could be played without investing a penny in sets.” 

Standing on this ancient stage, the A.M.C. scribe says he felt a sense of Walpurgis Night, or the eve of May Day when folklore tells us that witches rode on their appointed rendezvous.

Though more than two hundred years have passed since it was abandoned, Dogtown still has the power to speak of the past.  It clearly stands as a memorial to a vanished civilization.  The boulders carved in relief forever mark its history and lend it the hushed mysteries of a cemetery. Who carved these numbers and these “sermons in stone,” and why?

It helps to know that these trails are the ancient roadways and walkways used for three hundred years.  Old Rockport Road, which cuts across a corner of Dogtown, was once a major thoroughfare trodden by Indians and European settlers.  It quietly leads walkers now along its wide clear path away from the booming industrial park.  It takes a straight route to the back of a three-hundred-year-old stone building, now the Babson Museum, where an ancestor of the man responsible for the carved boulders once made barrels.  The barrels were assembled to store the alewives, or herring, that were caught in Dogtown’s Alewife Brook after swimming upstream from their ocean habitat to spawn.  This brook was dammed to create the Babson Reservoir.

The entrance to the reservoir lies on the other side of the industrial park, accessible by heading back out onto “America’s Technology Highway” and exiting at the rotary that bewilders most drivers unfamiliar with Gloucester.  (Hint:  the car in the rotary has the right of way.)  Somewhere back behind all the houses on the main road to town are a series of side streets that lead to Linskey’s Junk Yard, an unlikely portal to such a pristine area.  Carolyn O’Connor, of the Watershed Committee, took me there one rainy April day and I was surprised to see, next to heaps of ruined cars and scraps of metal, two stone pillars, obviously erected long ago.  They bear bronze plaques that read: 

“Babson Reservoir and Sanctuary.  This reservoir, watershed and reservation are for the people of Gloucester, the land having been given in memory of my father and grandfather who roamed over these rocky hills.  They had the vision that someday it should be conserved for the uses of the city and as an inspiration to all lovers of God and nature.”

Roger W. Babson, landowner, environmentalist, entrepreneur, candidate for president, and founder of three colleges, gave 1150 wooded acres of Dogtown to the city of Gloucester in 1930.  Roger, himself a descendant of Dogtown’s settlers, loved this land and knew its secret places and its odd stories.  In his pamphlet “Gloucester’s Deserted Village” he wrote, “There is something inspiring in the huge barren hills and great boulders of Gloucester’s Dogtown. At the same time, there are pathos and tragedy in the old forsaken cellars of the original inhabitants…”  He referred to Dogtown as one of his hobbies, and he painstakingly located and identified forty of the sixty ancient cellar holes, recording them by number then carving the number into stone next to each site.

It was also Roger Babson who inscribed the sermons in stones.  Not personally.  He hired thirty-six unemployed Finnish stonecutters to carve them during the depression.  Why?  It was part of his philanthropic nature, for one thing, providing employment to the men left destitute by the depression and subsequent closing of the Cape Ann granite quarries. And, he had a few things to say.  If you ever wanted your words carved in stone, this was the way to do it.  While his relatives accused him of “defacing the boulders and disgracing the family with the inscriptions,” he argued that “the work gives me a lot of satisfaction, fresh air, exercise and sunshine.  I am really trying to write a simple book with words carved in stone instead of printed on paper.” 

Exploring Dogtown is almost like visiting a natural theme park without the tourist trappings, though a real theme park was once proposed for the site by someone from off the Cape.  An adventurous hiker can walk for miles and exit Dogtown at a variety of spots anywhere in Gloucester or Rockport.  Along the way, you can try to locate some of the boulders, some now hidden by the wild overgrowth of brush, others appearing silhouetted on the barren landscape.  There are reputed to be a total of thirty, give or take a few.  They proclaim “USE YOUR HEAD,” “IF WORK STOPS VALUES DECAY,” and “KEEP OUT OF DEPT.”  There are single words standing in testament to Babson’s values:  “KINDNESS,” “COURAGE,” “LOYALTY,” and then there are the five “I’s”  “IDEAS,” “IDEALS,” “INTELLIGENCE,” “INITIATIVE,” and of course, “INDUSTRY.”           

Finding some of them is a challenge, says a coworker who shared his interest in Dogtown with me after reading my newsletter piece.  A mechanical engineer, he has mapped every one of Babson’s boulders that he can locate and has entered the coordinates into his global positioning system (GPS). Stan, whose last name ironically happens to be Stone, ventures into the woods from time to time to verify his data and to search for the missing boulders.  The thirty or so of Babson’s maxims are recorded but their individual locations are not.  While Babson did indicate where the cellar holes were located, he had no reason to mark the sermons in stone on the map he made, perhaps not realizing that one day they would be just as interesting, if not more so, than the cellar holes.

“The stones always fascinated me,” Stan tells me, eager to share his enthusiasm for using satellites and the latest in technology to locate the stones.  “They are so unique.”   Though he spent a recent vacation trekking in Utah, of Dogtown he says, “nothing else compares.”  He uses GPS as part of his enjoyment of the trails he hikes, and also it helps to keep him from getting lost.  His first handheld GPS contained all the waypoints, or locations, of the stones he found during his early excursions into Dogtown. The GPS was stolen from his car in Boston one day, and so was the information stored on it.  Stan purchased a new Garmin e-Map and retraced his steps, trying to rebuild his database.  Today he is actually happier with his new data because his earlier waypoints were recorded when the U.S. Department of Defense was still intentionally scrambling the GPS signals emitted by satellite.  At that time the waypoints were accurate only to within three hundred feet.  Now they are accurate to within thirty feet. 

Before the government changed the scrambling policy, Stan would go to a waypoint and have to look around because he wouldn’t be at exactly the right place.  With the new system that provides more accurate signals, “you’re right on top of it,” he says.  There’s still some room for error.  “Accuracy is a function of where the satellites are at any given moment,” Stan explains.  GPS, he adds, is “amazing technology.  You don’t need a sextant or thousands of dollars worth of equipment to tell you where you are.  GPS is something that works anywhere in the world, and gives you access to a few billion dollars worth of military technology essentially for free.”  For the cost of a handheld GPS, that is, which amounts to about two hundred dollars.

Like Babson, Stan went to MIT for an engineering degree.  He appreciates Babson’s inspiration and finds patterns in the layout of the boulders’ messages, most of which are concentrated along the trails.  If he were to meet Babson in some time warp -- and in Dogtown anything seems possible -- Babson would no doubt quickly grasp the idea of Stan’s GPS and might possibly show him where “INTELLIGENCE” and “IDEALS” are located, two boulders on the list of maxims that still elude him.  Though five of the boulders are very near the medical center in the industrial park, Stan says two are covered by vegetation.  “If you don’t go down the right path, you’ll be mired in briars.”

The remoteness of Dogtown appeals to a cross-section of humanity.  While mountain bikers come here to challenge their skills on the rugged paths, vagrants come to set up camp and fugitives to escape the law.  Stolen cars have been abandoned or burned here, and garbage is sometimes dumped by residents who don’t want to pay the dollar-per-barrel fee for curbside removal.  At the Goose Cove Reservoir entrance, the path is strewn with fresh dog droppings, leaving one to reconsider how the area got its name.  I have seen signs of thoughtless campfires.  About ten years ago, one was built directly under Whale’s Jaw, and its intense heat cleaved the unique rock formation in half, leaving it virtually unidentifiable. Abutting Dogtown is an active shooting range, and between October and March hunting is permitted.  Gunshots ring through the woods.  There is good reason to hesitate before going in.

During the summer dry spells, the woods are closed to prevent fires but it’s difficult to patrol the area.  A constable was appointed to stand guard at the industrial park entrance and ward off motorized vehicles and chase out troublemakers.  In his sixties or maybe even seventies, Joe Orange, ex-paratrooper, ex-English teacher, rugged sportsman, and member of the ad hoc Watershed Committee was on duty for the better part of a year, wearing shorts even in winter, and exposing his hardened, impervious muscles.  He is formidable, and unafraid of marching into the woods, armed, to kick out vagrants and vandals as easily as he must have dismissed badly behaved students from his class.

Joe loves the land where he grew up swimming, exploring, hunting, and fishing.  And he knew Roger Babson.  During our meetings to plan the Earth Day celebration, he shared some of his memories with me.  “As a six year old, I was out in the woods and Roger W. Babson took me by the hand and said, ‘Promise me you will always take care of these woods when I’m gone.’  I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I’ve tried to do just that all my life.  He was my hero.  His love for this land was welded into the ground.”

The city of Gloucester now owns most of the land, and the Essex County Greenbelt has been instrumental in promoting measures to maintain it.  While Dogtown’s past has been a quirky, strange story, so is its present.  Set aside for passive recreation, only ad hoc committees have protected it. The Dogtown Advisory Committee was formed in 1985, but Gloucester is fiercely proud of its independent spirit and has no plans to change anything or to increase protection of the area.  In fact, the single marked entrance to Dogtown is subtly placed on a little-traveled back road.  Despite the intrusions of vehicles and vagrants, it remains much as Henry David Thoreau found it in 1858, when he walked along its paths and called them “a good place to walk.”  He found himself: 

“…in the midst of boulders scattered over bare hills and fields, such as we had seen on the ridge northerly in the morning, i.e., they abound chiefly in the central and northwesterly part of the Cape.  This was the most peculiar scenery of the Cape.  We struck inland southerly, just before sundown, and boiled our tea with bayberry bushes by a swamp on the hills, in the midst of these great boulders, about half-way to Gloucester, having carried our water a quarter of a mile, from a swamp, spilling a part in threading swamps and getting over rough places.  Two oxen feeding in the swamp came up to reconnoitre our fire.  We could see no house, but hills strewn with boulders, as though they had rained down, on every side, we sitting under a shelving one.  When the moon rose, what had appeared like immense boulders half a mile off in the horizon now looked by contrast no larger than nutshells or burlnut against the moon’s disk, and she was the biggest boulder of all.”

The ghosts of Dogtown, both its original settlers and those who explored it and cared for it in the past, lure nature lovers and explorers to this day.  In the face of progress and intervention, it still stands a timeless spot in testament to the power of nature and it has a draw that defies development.  Gloucester has seen to that by acquiring most of the land, and, more importantly, leaving it alone.