My View of Life on the Dock
Dogtown is eligible for the National Register! Will Gloucester earn another major district designation?
Come to a special public presentation November 29th in Kyrouz Auditorium in Gloucester City Hall, 9 Dale Avenue, at 7pm.
Read excerpts from the press release shared by Bill Remsen, local project coordinator, and Mary Ellen Lepionka, co-chair Gloucester Historical Commission, and some Dogtown maps and memorabilia 1633-1961:
Jane Deering Gallery
Deep in the Quiet Wood
Featuring: Gabrielle Barzaghi, Adin Murray, Michael Porter, Esther Pullman, George Wingate
Opening Reception: Saturday. October 7, 5-7PM.
from the gallery printed matter:
Continue reading “Deep in the Quiet Wood opening reception Oct 7 Jane Deering Gallery”
Every day.
September 26, 1852
The increasing scarlet and yellow tints around the meadows and the river remind me of the opening of a vast flower bud. They are the petals of its corolla, which is of the width of the valleys. It is the flower of autumn whose expanding bud just begins to blush. As yet however in the forest there are very few changes of foliage.
September 24, 1852
…Am surprised to find, by Botrychium Swamp, a Rhus Radicans* …, – growing in the midst of a clump of barberry bushes which it overhangs. It is now at the height of its change, very handsome scarlet and yellow, and I not at first know what it was.
October 24, 1858
The brilliant autumnal colors are red and yellow and the various tints–hues and shades of these. Blue is reserved to be the color of the sky**, but yellow and red are the colors of the earth flower. Every fruit on ripening, and just before its fall, acquires a bright tint. So do the leaves–so the sky before the end of the day, and the year near its setting. October is the red sunset sky–November the later twilight…The scarlet oak…is now in its glory…Look at one completely changed from green to bright dark scarlet–every leaf, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet dye, between you and the sun. Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think ten days ago that that cold green tree could assume such color as this.
*Rhus Radicans is poison ivy **and the sea all around us
Log entries focused on Thoreau’s observations of flowers in Concord, MA, are gathered together into a wonderful volume, ed. Geoff Wisner.
September 19, 1854
Thinking this afternoon of the prospect of my writing lectures and going abroad to read them the next winter, I realized how incomparably great the advantages of obscurity and poverty which I have enjoyed so long (and may still perhaps enjoy). I thought with what more than princely, with what poetical leisure I had spent my years hitherto, without care or engagement, fancy free. I have given myself up to nature. I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them–and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me. I have spent a couple of years, for instance, with the flowers chiefly, having none other so binding engagement as to observe when they opened. I could have afforded to spend a whole fall observing the changing tints of the foliage.
A Barry Moser whale drawing is featured on the Gloucester HarborWalk whale marker.
“This Saturday morning forum is offered in collaboration with Essex County Greenbelt, Friends of Dogtown, Lanesville Community Center and Mass Audubon and held at Cape Ann Museum. The forum will be moderated by Ed Becker, President of the Essex County Greenbelt Association.”
UPDATE: Cape Ann TV is scheduled to film the event!
Chris Leahy gave a presentation at Gloucester Lyceum & Sawyer Free Library on February 23, 2017: Dogtown- the Biography of a Landscape: 750 Million Years Ago to the Present
A photographic history through slides presented by the Gloucester Lyceum and the Friends of the Library. Mary Weissblum opened the program.
Chris broadly covered the history of the local landscape from an ecological bent with a bias to birds and blueberry picking, naturally. New England is a patchwork of forested landscapes. He stressed the evolution of bio diversity and succession phenomenon when the earth and climate change. “Nature takes a lot of courses.” He focused on Dogtown, “a very special place”, and possible merits of land stewardship geared at fostering greater biodiversity. Perhaps some of the core acres could be coaxed to grasslands as when parts of Gloucester were described as moors? Characteristic wildlife, butterflies, and birds no longer present may swing back. There were many philosophical takeaways and tips: he recommends visiting the dioramas “Changes in New England Landscape” display at Harvard Forest HQ in Petersham.
“Isolation of islands is a main driver of evolution”
“Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester has the highest concentration* of native butterflies in all of Massachusetts because of secondary habitats.” *of Mass Audubon’s c.40,000 acres of wildlife sanctuaries statewide. “The fact that Brook Meadow Brook is in greater Worcester, rather than a forested wilderness, underscores the value of secondary habitats.”
“1830– roughly the time of Thoreau (1817-1862)– was the maximum period of clearing thus the heyday for grasslands…As farmsteads were abandoned, stages of forests return.”
Below are photos from February 23, 2017. I added some images of art inspired by Dogtown. I also pulled out a photograph by Frank L Cox, David Cox’s father, of Gallery on the Moors (then) compared with a photo of mine from 2011 to illustrate how the picturesque description wasn’t isolated to Dogtown.
Louise Upton Brumback (1867-1929), Dogtown- Cape Ann, 1920 oil on canvas
“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Sometimes called the first environmentalist, Thoreau, born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, was mentored by the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, his neighbors. His book Walden, about the two years he spent living in a hut he had built himself on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond, has become a classic of American literature for its introspection blended with natural history. His Civil Disobedience, written as an explanation of his non-payment of taxes as a protest against the Mexican-American war, is still influential, and his books on his journeys to Maine, Canada and Cape Cod go much deeper than mere travelogues. Thoreau is also credited with the invention of raisin bread.
Jay DiPrima will read from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience at seven o’clock next Thursday evening at the Sawyer Free Library as part of the Gloucester Lyceum Series.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Sometimes called the first environmentalist, Thoreau, born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, was mentored by the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, his neighbors. His book Walden, about the two years he spent living in a hut he had built himself on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond, has become a classic of American literature for its introspection blended with natural history. His Civil Disobedience, written as an explanation of his non-payment of taxes as a protest against the Mexican-American war, is still influential, and his books on his journeys to Maine, Canada and Cape Cod go much deeper than mere travelogues. Thoreau is also credited with the invention of raisin bread.
August 16, 2012
“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Sometimes called the first environmentalist, Thoreau, born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, was mentored by the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, his neighbors. His book Walden, about the two years he spent living in a hut he had built himself on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond, has become a classic of American literature for its introspection blended with natural history. His Civil Disobedience, written as an explanation of his non-payment of taxes as a protest against the Mexican-American war, is still influential, and his books on his journeys to Maine, Canada and Cape Cod go much deeper than mere travelogues. Thoreau is also credited with the invention of raisin bread.
Good Morning Gloucester 