Most people associate Cape Ann - the other cape along the Massachusetts coast - with the sea - with seafood restaurants, scenic vistas, sailing, scuba diving, and surfing. Few are aware of the mysteries that lie hidden in the middle of the Cape. Hiking through the woods one encounters all kinds of interesting things: gigantic boulders, rock walls, stone foundations, collapsed wells, abandoned quarries, old roads and more. Covered by bittersweet and cat briar, much of the interior has been undisturbed for hundreds of years. It is not the coastline of Cape Ann with its quaint shops, sandy beaches, and ocean vistas, but the island woods - the vast unsettled area stretching from Lanesville south to Blackburn Circle, from Riverdale east to Rockport - that is the subject of this book. For here are the remains of a colonial settlement that became known as Dogtown in its latter days, old quarries now popular (but private) swimming holes, and word rocks scattered about the rocky terrain telling us how to live our lives - all connected by a maze of old roads and trails that date back to colonial times and still confuse and confound even the most experienced hiker. Our understanding of a place is limited by the relatively short time we experience it. We often forget that places have a history. It may not always be significant but it is often interesting. Imagining what existed in the past is a kind of mental exercise that gets us into the mode of thinking about a place as a function of time, like the time traveler in the H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine. This book complements the many books, both historical and fictional, that have been written about Dogtown and Cape Ann. The narrative and photographs are wrapped around a new map that serves as a time machine for exploring the inland woods. Using this map we can follow old roads the early settlers used to travel point-to-point from one hamlet along the coast to another, not all the way around along Route 127 as we do today. We can go to the Commons Settlement - one of the first settlements on Cape Ann, where we try to imagine what it was like to live there without running water and other modern conveniences. We find the homes of Peter Lurvey, Judy Rhines, Easter Carter, Granny Day, and other characters from the stories of Charles E. Mann and Anita Diamant, where James Merry, the tragic figure of Charles Olson’s poem, Maximus of Dogtown died, and the places where artists like Marsden Hartley and John Sloan painted their rocky landscapes. From Dogtown we can head north to visit the granite quarries and compare what we see today with the stark landscapes of past centuries when huge open pits dominated the northern hills of the Cape. Or we can fast forward to the 1930s and follow trails south to the Babson Boulders - Roger Babson’s values and philosophy etched in stone - and beyond to the Babson Reservoir - the Babson family’s enduring legacy to the people of Gloucester. This new revised and expanded edition contains additional chapters on Dogtown’s historical landscapes, and on nearby Poles Hill. Using historical photographs, landscape art, and maps, we see the dramatic changes that have taken place in Dogtown over the past century, and wonder if it is possible to restore the open, scenic terrain that inspired painters and writers, and supported a much more diverse ecosystem including birds, butterflies, and blueberries. The last chapter provides a brief history of Poles Hill, and describes a newly discovered site that may have been used as a solar observatory by Native Americans living on Cape Ann more than two thousand years ago.
