A common misconception about Dogtown is why it was settled in the first place. Many people believe that families settled in the area because it was far from the coast and they were safe from pirates and Native Americans looking to pillage the coastline. While this would be a very dramatic and still reasonable explanation as to why this area was chosen to be what was known as the Commons Settlement, it is untrue. Author Elyssa East desired to piece together this mystery when writing her book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, and her findings proved differently.
East's research showed that few pirate accounts had been recorded during the time the area was settled, and so the tale was unlikely. Rather, East's research show that when Cape Ann became heavily deforested, an abundant amount of land was left available for human habitation. Unfortunately, the land was rougher and rockier than the rest of the Cape, but the men who decided to settle here were optimistic about what they could transform and achieve by making it the center of the town's workforce. They offered land grants to newcomers, and many took themselves up on these offers. Due to the land's close proximity to the Green, which had been Gloucester's social and commercial center, it is no wonder the land had appealed to people looking to build homes and grow families.
The Commons Settlement had not been unlike other settlements in colonial America. People grew corn beside their homes, shrunk wool for clothing, cut wood at the numerous mills by the Alewife Brook and Mill river, and created various kinds of tools used for activities ranging from farming to fishing. Most of the land was used for agriculture, but the ground was filled with rocks, making it difficult to grow anything sufficiently. The people mostly lived off of dinners consisting of peas, baked beans, cornmeal, rye, fish, and wild plants harvested nearby. While the people who lived here were not wealthy, they were members of Gloucester's first earliest settlers, and therefor held a higher position than others in the town. When a dispute began in 1729, Nathaniel Coit would enter the Commons Settlement looking for support.
In 1729, a disagreement regarding the town's meetinghouse took to fire. It had been located in the Green, but some of the townspeople felt the need to relocate the meetinghouse to a new location. How they were going to pay for this new building and who was going to be assigned what seat within the building, however, stirred controversy within the town. Seating in the meetinghouse was serious business for puritans and where a person sat determined their level of dignity. Nathaniel Coit was fighting against this move to relocate, and went to the Commons Settlement to gain support from the people living there. The tensions created by the dispute continued relentlessly until 1743, when the town separated and agreed to allow each other to have their own parishes. The Green and the Commons Settlement continued to use the old meetinghouse as their own. With this, the people of the Green and the Commons became socially isolated, and people living in these areas became disconnected with their families. Wishing to reconnect with their loved ones, more people began relocating closer to the shore. The population continued to dwindle, and during the Revolutionary War, the old meetinghouse was forced to close.
After the Revolutionary War, the inhabitants left in the woods mostly consisted of widows of soldiers and sailors who kept their dogs for protection. Many people believe that the name Dogtown was given to the Commons Settlement because of the abundance of feral dogs that lived in the area after their owners died. By contrast, Elyssa East writes that she found via her research that while the term Dogtown once literally meant "a town overrun by dogs", the nineteenth-century use of the word often referred to minorities and women. Other places given the name "Dogtown" referred to town that had dwindled down the path of isolation, which fits the descriptions of Gloucester's Common Settlements.
By looking at Dogtown in a perspective free of its lore and dramatic tales, we can view it less as a dangerous land filled with the ghosts of feral dogs and people dying by wrongful death, and see it more clearly for what it actually offers: a sanctuary where one can escape to appreciate history and nature simultaneously.
The information above was gathered from Elyssa East's book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town.
East, Elyssa. Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town. New York:
Free, 2009. Print.
