A series of presentations focusing on Dogtown’s historic significance – as a conservation area, as a source of artistic and literary inspiration, as a municipal property – and a discussion about the future. Presented in collaboration with the Gloucester Lyceum & Sawyer Free Library. This program will be held at the Cape Ann Museum in the Auditorium and is free and open to the public. Space is limited – seating is on a first come first served basis.

List of presenters:

Shep Abbott is an award winning filmmaker, writer and visual artist who works in several mediums including painting, drawing and sculpture. Much of his film work has been concentrated on wildlife, ethnography and history. In 2004 he produced a one-hour documentary, More Precious Than Gold on the early settlement of Gloucester and Cape Ann. In 1994 he founded Fishtown Artspace, Inc., a nonprofit art center for all ages, which he ran for 13 years. During that time, he formed a workshop of young people who mapped Dogtown and produced a hand-painted mural map from their work. He is a member of the Lanesville Community Center Board of Directors, the U.U. choir, Social Justice and Green Committees, the Cape Ann Museum, the Writers Guild of America, East and is a founding member of the Dogboys.

Peter Anastas is a Gloucester native and writer. He was first taken to Dogtown as a child in the early 1940s by his grandmother and aunts to pick blueberries, experiences that affected him deeply. As a student at Gloucester High School, he often walked on Dogtown with historians Elliott Rogers and Melvin Copeland, who helped him to further appreciate its natural features. In 1984, he was appointed to the Dogtown Steering Committee and helped to draft its 1985 Management Plan, submitted to the city in August of 1985, after which he became a member and later chair of the Dogtown Advisory Committee. Anastas has written about Dogtown for the Gloucester Times, and has also written and spoken about the Dogtown paintings and poetry of Marsden Hartley at the Cape Ann Museum.

Ed Becker has 35 years of experience in land conservation, environmental protection and nonprofit management. Since 1987, he has served as the executive director of Essex County Greenbelt, a nonprofit land trust, where he has been involved in over 250 land conservation projects. The acquisition and protection of land in and adjacent to Dogtown has been a long-standing focus of Greenbelt. Ed has presented workshops and provided technical assistance on land conservation in the U.S., Latin America and Europe. He sits on a number of state and national environmental boards and is the recipient of a Massachusetts Governor’s Award for Open Space Protection. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Mark Carlotto is an aerospace engineer with over thirty years of experience in satellite imaging, pattern recognition, terrain mapping, and mobile applications. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981, and has published more than 100 papers in a variety of technical areas. Soon after moving to Gloucester in 2003, Mark got lost in Dogtown. As a result he decided to map all of the trails, spending hundreds of hours following every path and investigating every cellar hole he could find. His 2007 book The Dogtown Guide received a Preservation Award from the Gloucester Historical Commission. His second book, The Island Woods, published in 2012, is a spatial history of the interior of Cape Ann. Using maps and photographs, he goes back and forth in time, describing the old roads, settlements, granite quarries and enigmatic boulders of the Cape.

Christopher Leahy holds the Gerard A. Bertrand Chair of Natural History and Field Ornithology at the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He has been a professional conservationist for more than 35 years, most recently as the Director of Massachusetts Audubon’s Center for Biological Conservation. His interests in natural history are comprehensive and he is a recognized authority on birds and insects. His published works include The Birdwatcher’s Companion, The First Guide to Insects, Introduction to New England Birds, An Introduction to Massachusetts Insects and The Nature of Massachusetts. He has designed and led birding/natural history tours to over 75 countries on all of the continents. He has lived in Gloucester with his family since the 1970’s.

Mary Ellen Robbins Lepionka has a master’s degree in anthropology and studied at Boston University and the University of British Columbia. Her fieldwork included archaeological excavations in Massachusetts and Botswana and an economic anthropology study in Saudi Arabia. She has taught at Boston University, Vancouver City College, Northeastern University, North Shore Community College and Salem State College. In 1990 she began a career in higher education publishing. In 2002 she established Atlantic Path Publishing and self-published Writing and Developing Your College Textbook and Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements. Mary Ellen’s parents were Cape Ann artists and she has lived here off and on since infancy. During the past five years she has been researching, presenting programs, and publishing articles on the archaeology and early history of Cape Ann and the Native Americans who lived here in preparation for a book on the subject.

Frank (Sib) Wright is an attorney and former professor of law at Boston University. During the early 1970s he served in the Environmental Protection Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, following which he founded a law firm specializing in land use and environmental law. He retired in 1998 and studied furniture and cabinetmaking at the North Bennett Street School in Boston. He is a member of the Dogtown Advisory Committee and the Gloucester Zoning Board of Appeals.