The places we inhabit have their origins in the past. Cities were towns, and towns, villages. Before shopping malls were fields and farmland. There is a connection back in time to the first settlements, and beyond.
But there are places that are different, that had no future. Places that were abandoned, and eventually forgotten. Dogtown is one such place, which I learned about only after I had moved to Gloucester. As it turned out, the edge of Dogtown was in my very own backyard.
Looking out into the woods at night, I wondered what was out there. I read about the old settlement in the middle of Cape Ann, how it grew, and then declined after the Revolutionary War, and how the land, once forested, was cleared for its lumber. I learned that the land I now lived on was once part of a farm, whose animals would graze up in the pastures of Dogtown. After the cows had come home for the last time, trees and brush began to grow back. Deserted now for almost two hundred years, the houses were gone. Only their cellar holes remained. Camouflaged among the rocks and engulfed by vegetation, the vestiges of this former settlement were disappearing.