Innsmouth.
Innsmouth was a small seaside town in Essex County, Massachusetts run by the Esoteric Order of Dagon and their Deep One allies until their destruction in 1928.
History[]
Background[]
Innsmouth was founded in 1643, quickly becoming a major center of commerce upon the Atlantic due to its large harbor. Ships from this town sailed all over the world, bringing back goods from many ports of call. During the war of 1812, the captains of Innsmouth turned privateer and attacked the British fleet. Half of Innsmouth's sailors perished during skirmishes with the enemy, marking the end of the town's prosperity.
After the war, Innsmouth's revenue came mainly from the mills built on the banks of the Manuxet and Captain Obed Marsh's successful trading ventures in the Indies. Around 1840, Marsh lost a source of the gold upon which he had depended, and the town's economy spiraled downward. It was around this time that Marsh began the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a cult based on a combination of Scripture and the beliefs of the Polynesian islanders Obed Marsh had visited in Ponape. Some whispered that Marsh's Order worshiped darker gods, and the Order's nocturnal trips to Devil's Reef are legendary.
Innsmouth Plague[]
1846 was the year of the Innsmouth Plague. The exact disease responsible has never been identified, though it might have been a malady brought to the town on one of the remaining traders. What precisely happened during the plague remains a mystery, though evidently rioting and looting were widespread. When visitors from neighboring villages arrived, they found half of the town's people dead and Obed Marsh and his Order in firm control of the town.
In that same year, Captain Marsh and thirty-two fellow cultists were arrested by Selectman Mowry. However, before they could be charged, the Deep Ones stormed the town, breaking them out and purging the resistant population. The 'plague' was in fact a purging committed by the Deep Ones to contain the secrecy of the darkness within Innsmouth Half of the population were killed in what was covered up as a plague from China.
Decline and Destruction[]
Despite Innsmouth's curious newfound wealth in fishing and gold refining, the town's fortunes continued to decline. Also, degenerative traits began to turn up in the resident's children, most likely the aftereffects of the plague. During the Civil War, the town was unable to meet its quota of draftees due to these widespread deformities. Innsmouth remained under the Marsh family's rule for many years, and over time became shunned by the people of the surrounding countryside.
This state of affairs continued until 1927, when the government launched an investigation into supposed bootlegging taking place in the town. This inquiry culminated in a raid in mid-February, 1928 (though one source places it in early summer), in which federal agents dynamited many of the town's abandoned buildings, disbanded the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and removed the bulk of Innsmouth's population to military prisons. Rumors persist that a submarine fired torpedoes off of Devil's Reef at an unknown target. The surviving residents of Innsmouth took refuge to Oakmont, Massachusetts.