A brief history of the Dottoman Empire (part I)

Where's the best place to begin a sprawling epic? In the hazy mists of long-forgotten time, of course. This is the easy part. The innuendo, rumors and crackpot theories that pass for the next-best-thing to truth are our only reliable sources detailing Dorchester's origins. Believe them or not, this is what we have to work with today. If these tales seem likely, they probably are. If you leave skeptical, you are forgiven. As our history approaches the present more verifiable facts and documented observations will make up the narrative, but in the beginning we deal with prehistory, before anything was written down. All that survives is vestigial memory of the oral version recited around campfires, open hearths and Franklin stoves...

God set a milkweed pod adrift on the Atlantic and it floated into Boston Harbor. When it hit land, it stuck, and Dorchester was formed. The feathery milkweed seeds grew into trees and the seeds at their roots became the rocks that underlie Dorchester. The milkweed pod sunk in the surf and the seeds gathered in the mud and this where puddingstone comes from. Bees visited the flowering trees and this is why Dorchester is sometimes called the land of milk and honey.

No people lived in this newly made Dorchester but faerie folk moved in as soon as the ground was stable. They gathered rocks into boulders and they carved the landscape into hills and spreading fields. This part of Boston, like the others, has always been a place of rearranging terrain. It is a theme revisited again and again. The faeries weren't tall, and this is why Mount Bowdoin isn't much of a mountain to people who are familiar with the real thing.

One night a star fell out of the sky and it landed on what the wee faerie folk called Rock Hill. They took it as a sign and since that day, even though the wee folk are forgotten, this is a sacred place in the neighborhood. Its summit is preserved as it has been for millenia. No house stands on it and Rock Hill has never been razed to fill the marshland to its east. Rock Hill is, in fact, the spot where great changes started in Dorchester, but that is meat for another chapter.

When the first human family arrived in what is now called Dorchester, the wee folk were suspicious but welcoming enough. They had good manners though they knew these taller people would soon have the run of the place. For many generations, they shared the land and its resources amiably. The faeries kept to the woods and the shadows while the taller people kept to the shore and the daylight most of the time. It was a peaceable arrangement and both parties honored and assisted the other.