Ravenswood Park (Gloucester, Massachusetts)

USA / Massachusetts / Gloucester / Gloucester, Massachusetts / Western Avenue
Long treasured by residents of Gloucester and neighboring towns, Ravenswood Park offers a tranquil wooded setting for walking, cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing along almost ten miles of trails and carriage paths. Visitors may enjoy the overlook to Gloucester Harbor and traverse a boardwalk through the Great Magnolia Swamp, home to native sweetbay magnolias (Magnolia virginiana). A plaque marks the spot in the woods where naturalist Mason "The Hermit" Walton built his cabin in the 1880s.

The history of Ravenswood Park begins in the late nineteenth century with Samuel Sawyer's plan to preserve woods in Gloucester. Over many years, Sawyer, a noted businessman and philanthropist, purchased woodlots, old pastures, and swamp near his home on Freshwater Cove. Upon his death in 1889, Sawyer left the land -- by then more than twenty-six parcels -- to a board of trustees to be turned into a park. Sawyer included an endowment and instructions that the park "be laid out handsomely with drive-ways and pleasant rural walks" and required that it be named Ravenswood, for the castle in Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor. Over the next twenty-five years, the Trustees of Ravenswood Park carried out Sawyer's vision and continued to acquire adjacent parcels of land.

In 1993, the Trustees of Ravenswood Park transferred the property to The Trustees of Reservations.
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Coordinates:   42°35'56"N   70°41'54"W

Comments

  • Ravenswood is on the north side of Western Ave. http://www.thetrustees.org/pages/357_ravenswood_park.cfm
This article was last modified 13 years ago