Elyssa East - Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town

Death and Enchantment in a
New England Ghost Town

Elyssa East

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Copyright 2009 by Elyssa East

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First Free Press hardcover edition December 2009

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Works by Charles Olson published during his lifetime are
copyright by the Estate of Charles Olson; previously unpublished
works among the Charles Olson Research Collection at the Thomas J. Dodd
Research Center are copyright by the University of Connecticut Libraries.
Excerpts from December 18th , From Coles Island, Letter 7, and
MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWNI are used with permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

East, Elyssa.
Dogtown: death and enchantment in a New England ghost town / Elyssa East.
p. cm.
1. Dogtown Commons (Gloucester, Mass.)Description and travel.
2. East, ElyssaHomes and haunts. 3. Gloucester (Mass.)History.
4. Ann, Cape, Region (Mass.)History. I. Title.
F74G5E27 2009
917.445dc22 2009017197
ISBN 978-1-4165-8704-0
ISBN 978-1-4165-8718-7 (ebook)

To my teachers,
and my parents,
Nancy McKinley East
and
Sanders Roland East

... as with sacred places, so with the murderous spots. The record of events is written into the earth.

HENRY MILLER ,
The Colossus of Maroussi

A FTER CROSSING THE Merrimack River, I turned onto Route 1A, continuing south through the picturesque towns of Massachusetts North Shore. I was traveling on a hunch in search of an abandoned colonial settlement called Dogtown Common, or simply Dogtown, though it was not identified on any map I could find at the time. It was one of those October days that inspire thoughts of harvest, not a battening down for winter. Traffic slowed through Newburyport, an archetypal New England town that keeps its collar buttoned. Kids sporting shiny jerseys in bright colors spilled out of cars parked roadside at a soccer tournament. Beyond the playing field and farm stands with pumpkins piled high, the landscape opened to tidal estuaries where gulls were lighting over mudflats and marsh grass in shades of golden taupe. The amber light warmed my skin, bringing a flush to my cheeks. I was feeling rapturous and inspired, dreaming of paintings coming to life.

I was on my way from Portland, Maine, where I lived during this 1999 autumn, to Gloucester, hoping to find the site that had inspired a series of paintings by Marsden Hartley. The New York Times has called Hartley the most gifted of the early American Modernists, while New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has written, Hartleys best art looms so far above the works of such celebrated contemporaries as Georgia OKeeffe, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and John Marin that it poses the question of how his achievement was even possible. The answer, I had learned, was to be found in Dogtown.

Hartley, a peripatetic, lonesome soul, had been obsessed with Dogtowns primordial, highland expanse, which he painted on three separate occasions in the 1930s. And while his Dogtown paintings helped lay the foundation for some of his later, greatest work, Hartley also claimed to have been forever changedand possibly healedby his time there. As for me, I was obsessed with Hartley, these paintings, and the 1931 summer he spent in this forgotten corner of America.

By official estimation, Dogtown is an unpopulated, roughly three-thousand-acre expansesome say morethat fills most of the geographic center of the island tip of Cape Ann, a crooked peninsula extending ten miles seaward from Massachusetts North Shore, twenty-five miles northeast of Boston. The end of this peninsula, where the city of Gloucester (population thirty-one thousand) and town of Rockport (population eight thousand) are located, is an island settlers created in 1643 by cutting through fifty yards of marsh in the Annisquam (or Squam) River. For most of American history, this island, which is nearly the same size as Manhattan, was accessible only by boat or a short drawbridge that crosses the colonial canal known as the Cut. Though the nearby towns of Essex and Manchester-by-the-Sea and parts of Gloucester are also situated on the peninsula, when people say Cape Ann, oftentimes they are referring to the island alone. For added emphasis, people on the island may say this side of the Cut. No matter where Cape Ann officially begins or ends, most everyone feels that the air is different after the Cut is crossed. Perhaps because Gloucester and Rockport extend so far into the Atlantic Ocean, something does change. It is the end of the line. Beyond the roads and the railway there is nothing but the sea.

The main roads around Cape Ann crest and fall over steep hills and tack hard on sharp corners as they follow the islands fifty miles of shoreline. Along them, smaller roads leading into the inland heart of this place climb steeply, if not suddenly, before narrowing, turning to dirt, and disappearing behind locked gates into the wilds of Dogtown.

Dogtowns terrain varies from forest to field where one can stumble upon stone remnants of colonial homes, to swamp and bog and hill and dale. Much of this highland area, the former pinnacle of an ancient pre-Cambrian mountain, is strewn with giant boulders. These boulders, some of which measure more than twenty feet in height, are glacial erratics from the Laurentide ice sheet, the continent-size Pleistoceneera glacier that once covered half of North America. Abandoned granite quarries pockmark the areas northern end. A commuter rail track that runs between Rockport and Gloucester before continuing south to Boston cuts through its eastern edge. The Babson and Goose Cove Reservoirs demarcate Dogtowns border to the southeast and west, respectively. These features define an area thats roughly three and a half times the size of Central Park.

Today Dogtown is heavily forestedmuch like it was before settlers cleared the forest primeval in the 1600swhich lends it a wilderness-like feel. But the area remained treeless for nearly three hundred years. This sere, barren wasteland was the most peculiar scenery of the Cape, as Henry David Thoreau put it, noting its hills strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down, on every side in his