This tour is fully booked; we apologize for any inconvenience. Please visit us for our next Dogtown event “Dogtown Days” at the Museum on Saturday, October 17, 2015.

Join Mark Carlotto, author of The Dogtown Guide (2007) and The Island Woods (2012) for a tour of the historic landscape which was captured by John Sloan during his time in Gloucester. $10 members; $15 nonmembers. For information and/or tickets and reservations, please email [email protected] or call (978) 283-0455 x10. Tickets can also be purchased at Eventbrite.  

The tour will meet at the parking lot a short distance up Dogtown Road (Dogtown Road starts at the Dogtown Common sign on Cherry Street). Shoes with good ankle support, insect repellant, water bottles, and snacks are all recommended. 

Our tour starts from the parking lot on Dogtown Road and will review the origin and decline of the old settlement we now call Dogtown. We will visit one of the oldest cellars in Dogtown that was inhabited by John Day around 1688 and the site of hte Easter Carter house — one of the most famous houses in Dogtown as told by Charles Mann in The Story of Dogtown. Continuing along Dogtown Toad, we will view what was a section of the historical landscape painted by John Sloan and Marsden Hartley a century ago. We will talk aobut how the old landscape has changed and what could be done to restore it. At the end of Dogtown Road we turn right at Granny Day’s Swamp and the site of one of the first schoolhouses in Gloucester. The landscape becomes more rugged as we enter the terminal moraine – the glacial remains from the last Ice Age. We are surrounded by rocks and boulders of all shapes and sizes including a number of “word rocks” carved by Babson and his men in the early 1930s. We stop at the largest one “Spiritual Power” and view the landscape to the south. Our return follows the same route back to the parking lot with two short stops along the way. The first is at the Pearce cellar, one of the largest in Dogtown. Our final stop is at the old pasture where James Merry was killed fighting a bull in 1892, immortalized by Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems.