Please note: This lecture is full to capacity; reservations will be required for entrance.

An illustrated lecture by Doug Stewart

Lecturer and freelance magazine writer Doug Stewart presents an illustrated lecture on Essex County’s spectacular Great Salt Marsh. The Marsh stretches from Cape Ann to New Hampshire and is a biological engine whose nutrients sustain fish stocks and bird life. It also protects shore towns from flooding and storm surges, but despite its necessity, the Marsh is poorly understood and under-appreciated. Stewart will explore the Great Marsh’s past as valuable real estate for farming salt hay, its unique success over much of the past century in dodging the nation’s swamp-filling mania, and its uncertain future as sea-level rise accelerates.

Photographs by Dorothy Kerper Monnelly of the Great Salt Marsh will be on view during the lecture.

Doug Stewart resides in Ipswich, MA and is a freelance magazine writer. He has pubished over 60 feature stories, many on history and the arts, in Smithsonian magazine and is author of The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly (Da Capo Press, 2010), a nonfiction book about a notorious literary hoax.