![\"Intelligence](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/picDogtown-Gloucester211106w_0293IntelligenceW.jpg\")
<\/a>Dogtown had been used as common land for wood and pasturing cattle and sheep by the 17th century English settlers who clustered their homes southwest of there, near what is now Grant Circle, the first rotary as one drives\u00a0into Gloucester north along Route 128. Some folks began building homes in Dogtown in the mid 1600s. Then in the early 1700s, the common land there was opened to individual settlement for the community\u2019s expanding population. At one point, perhaps 60 to 80 homes stood there. But after the Revolutionary War, because the sea was safe again from enemy ships, because fishing revived and international shipping arose, Gloucester\u2019s focus shifted to its prized natural harbor. And Dogtown, well inland, fell into decline.<\/p>\n
The name Dogtown, which seems to have attached to the settlement after the Revolution, is said to come from the dogs kept for security by poor women who continued to reside there. Though \u201cDogtown\u201d seems also to have sometimes been an American nickname for impoverished places. Historians say the last Dogtown resident left the area around 1830 and the last house was torn down around 1845. Though parts of the land continued to be used for grazing animals and other commercial purposes into the 20th century.<\/p>\n
Then along came Roger Babson (1875-1967), a Gloucester native and 10th generation descendent of some of the first English founders of the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is something inspiring in the huge barren hills and great boulders of Gloucester\u2019s Dogtown,\u201d he wrote in his 1935 autobiography \u201cActions and Reactions.\u201d \u201cAt the same time, there are pathos and tragedy in the old forsaken cellars of the original inhabitants.\u201d<\/p>\n Babson was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained engineer who founded a financial analysis firm that made him a millionaire. He was one of the first to predict the market crash of 1929 that began the Great Depression. He founded Babson Institute (now Babson College) in Wellesley, Webber College (now Webber International University) in Florida, and Utopia College in Kansas (which closed around 1970). He ran for U.S. president as the National Prohibition Party candidate in 1940, losing to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He founded the Gravity Research Foundation to find ways to counteract (as he described it in an essay) “Gravity \u2014 Our Enemy Number One,” which he blamed for the drowning deaths of a sister and a grandson. And he bought up a sizable chunk of Dogtown \u2014 donating more than 1,100 acres to the city of Gloucester in the 1930s \u201cas a park and watershed.\u201d (The city has since acquired some 800 additional\u00a0acres.)<\/p>\n Babson was intrigued by the abandoned settlement and set about trying to identify the sites of the original homes. He believed he found 40 of them, \u201chad a corresponding number carved upon the nearest boulder to each of these old cellars,\u201d and published a 1927 guide called \u201cDogtown \u2014 Gloucester\u2019s Deserted Village.\u201d<\/p>\n But he wasn\u2019t done. \u201cAnother thing I have been doing, which I hope will be carried on after my death, is the carving of mottoes on the boulders at Dogtown,\u201d he wrote in his autobiography. \u201cMy family says that I am defacing the boulders and disgracing the family with these inscriptions, but 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 on printed paper.\u201d<\/p>\n During the Depression, Babson hired unemployed quarry workers to carve inspirational slogans into the stones. Many of Babson’s slogans reek of the puritanical patronizing of a rich guy during the Depression: \u201cBe on time,\u201d \u201cIf work stops values decay,\u201d \u201cGet a job.\u201d Heading south along the path from Dogtown Square, you come upon \u201cUse Your Head,\u201d \u201cIndustry,\u201d \u201cInitiative,\u201d \u201cIntegrity.\u201d Then on a spur on the east side of the trail, you find one of the largest boulders, rising, perhaps, 20 feet tall. Carved into its face are the words \u201cSpiritual power.\u201d<\/p>\n During the Depression, much of the landscape was open pasture, and the boulders stood out among the grass and low scrub. In the decades since, forest has reclaimed the land, hiding the ghost town and boulders.<\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, nature, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, (hopefully) weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2021 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n In the woods at the heart of Gloucester lies a ghost town, the remnants\u00a0of an abandoned English colonial settlement today known as Dogtown. There are a number of ways to find it, walking in along old dirt paths winding through rolling, forested hills. Large granite stones\u00a0left there, they say, by ice age glaciers murmur of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20912,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,582],"tags":[946,947,35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20910"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20910"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20964,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20910\/revisions\/20964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a>
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