Dogtown

In the woods on Cape Ann are the cellar holes of a colonial settlement that emptied out and was left to the forest, the last resident carried out in 1830. Widows, freed slaves and the poor lived here at the end, and the town got its name from the dogs they kept. Then in the Depression, Roger Babson, a wealthy local eccentric, paid out-of-work Finnish stonecutters to carve mottoes into the glacial boulders: NEVER TRY NEVER WIN, HELP MOTHER, KEEP OUT OF DEBT. Some thirty of them are still there, scattered through the trees. It is free, public and genuinely eerie.