removed and taken to a poor house in Gloucester. The last structure in Dogtown was razed in 1845, ending what had once been a thriving community. Open grazing land After its abandonment, Dogtown was a mostly cleared open field with abundant boulders around. Nearby residents looked towards this land as a way to graze their farm animals. These animals were kept in private lots into the 1920s when the last of the plots were abandoned. In the decades that followed what was once open land eventually became a dense forest. Babson Boulders Most of the area of Dogtown is now a dense woodland, criss-crossed and bisected by trails and old roads. Dogtown Road off of Cherry Street in the western section (the Gloucester side) is lined with the remains of the cellar holes of the settlers, many of which are numbered in correspondence with names from John J. Babson's book of the history of Gloucester. Babson's grandson, Roger Babson, is known for, among other things, his commissioning of unemployed stonecutters to carve inspirational inscriptions on 36 boulders in Dogtown during the Great Depression. Babson also mapped and numbered the cellar holes left from the homes of Dogtown's former residents. Most of the land is held in trust by Gloucester and Rockport and is therefore protected in perpetuity. The current state of Dogtown affords rich recreation opportunities to hikers and bikers, dog-walkers, nature lovers, cross-country skiers, geologists and historians. The area is peppered with house-sized boulders, including one named "The Whale's Jaw," which it resembled before collapsing after a picnic campfire got out of control in 1989. The northwest corner of Dogtown is known as the Norton Memorial forest and covers 121 acres. This land is named for Frederick Norton, a NASA physicist and MIT professor whose family owned land on the outskirts of Dogtown. Beginning in the 1930s, Norton planted more than a 100,000 trees and forty different species of ferns there, and also forged and maintained trails nearby. References in popular culture Most of the novel La Mémoire de Tueur (The Memory of a Killer) by French-Canadian writer Sylvain Johnson takes place in Dogtown. American modernist Marsden Hartley painted a series of images of Dogtown in the 1920s and 30s The Last Days of Dogtown, a novel by Anita Diamant "Dogtown", a song by Harry Chapin "Forgotten", Episode 82 of the Lore Podcast, broadcast March 2018 "The Twelve Lives