Arkham

How to Find Arkham

Arkham is in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not far from the Atlantic Ocean, athwart the banks of the Miskatonic River, about 22 miles NNE of Boston, a little more than 12 miles south of Newburyport. Travelers reach it by car, bus, train, or small boat. Fare for the B&O commuter train from Boston is $2.20, and from Newburyport is $1.40.

Government

Akham Government

Arkham Government Town Hall, on Peabody Avenue, holds the town offices. Arkham has an elected mayor and nine elected selectmen, all part-time positions. Posts are held for two years; elections occur every even-numbered year on the first Tuesday in November. Longtime Mayor Joseph Peabody is being seriously challenged for mayor by the University’s energetic young president, Dr. Harvey Wainscott.

Occasionally the mayor can be found in his Town Hall office during the week. The council of selectmen meets in Town Hall the first and third Tuesdays of each month.

Police & Courts

The police force, inured to student antics, are forgiving of some behavior — harmless high jinks are expected. Though fear of offending an influential family curtails the reach of law enforcement into the campus community, police are not so forgiving when dealing with transients and immigrants. They are unsurprised to find when they find professorial types snooping around old houses and cemeteries, especially if given excuses like “field trip” or “historical research.”

Discharging a firearm in Arkham is illegal without good reason, as is possessing significant explosives such as dynamite or dynamite caps. Carrying a concealed weapon is legal, though almost suspiciously pointless in this placid place.

Fast Talk, Persuade, and Law skills are always valuable when dealing with the town constabulary, but a high Credit Rating renders a person nearly invulnerable to quick arrest. The police are basically honest, but they do not move without good reason against men and women whom they rightfully see as their employers. From chief on down, the police know that beer and liquor have been entering town despite Prohibition. Since even the chief enjoys a glass of Scotch in the evening, the police ignore social infractions by private citizens as much as possible. Helpful officers often escort home drunks, especially those inebriates with high Credit Ratings. Drunks who are rowdy and abusive risk being subdued, taken to the station, and booked; Judge Randall frequently hands out stiff penalties to those who cannot handle their liquor.

The speakeasy on the north side of town is an unremarkable fact to most; police force, government, and citizens look the other way, tolerating its existence, since it creates no problems for the town. Though they’ve long been aware of gangland problems in the big cities, they consider Prohibition to be the responsibility of the Commonwealth and federal agencies. Unfortunately, the bootleggers have spawned additional crime. A lieutenant, a sergeant, and a few patrolmen routinely receive weekly payoffs. As a whole, the force is well paid and satisfied, and relatively immune to one-time bribes from investigators and their ilk. The motorcycle police assigned to traffic duty are the most vulnerable, often accepting a few dollars in lieu of speeding citations.

Justice Court is held five days a week, starting promptly at 8:30 A.M. and lasting as long as court business provides. Judge Keezar Randall likely presides. Most misdemeanor arrests mean at least a night in jail, longer if it’s a weekend. Misdemeanors and other minor crimes call for warnings, fines, or short jail terms. Major felonies involve murder, kidnapping, grand larceny (theft of anything valued in excess of $100), and major destruction of property: such proceedings are bound over for trial at the Essex County Courthouse in Salem. Proceedings for some Commonwealth and all federal crimes are held in Boston, though arrests for them can be made anywhere in the state.

Crime, Ciminals, and Evil

Arkham, despite long acquaintance with strange and often unexplained events, views itself as a New England town isolated from and superior to the divisive problems and crude dangers of cities—an island of civilized virtue in the countryside, carved out of the wilderness by energy, thrift, and probity, held together to this day by respect, religion, and education, a place superior both to the mutant hive-like cities and to the ignorance and filth of rural backwaters.

Education is important in Arkham mostly as the passing-on of received truth, which should be not unduly disputed, analyzed, or reinterpreted. Free inquiry decently exists only in business dealings and in the obligatory tip of the hat to the long-ago Protestant rebels in far-off Europe.

Murders, kidnapings, burglaries, disappearances, fisticuffs, and drunken and indecent behavior traditionally occur among the poor, especially the immigrant poor, not among Arkham’s respectable families, who ignore or never learn of such matters. The occasional burglary of a fine home or an important shop reaps headlines; the disappearance of the Stolkowski’s youngest child doesn’t raise an eyebrow.

Arkham and Alcohol

Some of Arkham’s placid character has changed since the 18th Amendment, which barred the sale and use of alcohol for consumption on January 16, 1920. Like many places, Arkham never really went Dry. Imbibers, anticipating lean years, hoarded beer, wine, and liquor. As those sources were exhausted, illegal liquor distribution networks evolved from Canada and Europe. Later still, turf wars and price competition led criminals to set up their own distilleries.

In the early days of the Eighteenth Amendment, most of the alcohol coming into Arkham passed through the hands of Joe (Giuseppe) Potrello, who still lives on the Lower Southside. Potrello handsomely profited from alcohol, enough that an important source, a Boston Irish mob, decided to annex Arkham. Backed by mob money, Danny O’Bannion was sent in to buy out Potrell “peaceable-like” and become the local kingpin. His offer refused, O’Bannion lured a Potrello henchman to Boston and there murdered him. Potrello then quickly struck a deal, giving up the booze business in favor of tiny operations in gambling and prostitution.

Back to the days of the rum trade, alcoholism in the United States was epidemic, linked with innumerable cruelties and brutalities, but the systematic prohibition against alcoholic beverages created systematic crime, concentrating fortunes in the hands of ambitious thugs.

Street Gangs

Made up of teenage boys who have little future and lots of time, Arkham’s two street gangs, the Rocks and the ‘Finns are ethnic Italian and Irish, respectively. They incidentally lie, cheat, and steal, but mostly they gather together to swear, boast, and gain respect. They never cause trouble in wealthy neighborhoods because they know that there the police must be unmerciful. Occasionally a new, ambitious leader arises, but an O’Bannion thug either hires him or has him beaten until he flees town. Large fights between the two gangs have been infrequent lately, because territory boundaries have been observed. That can easily change.

Industry & Trade

General Hours of Business

Financial institutions generally are open to the public from 10:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., Monday-Friday. Governmental offices are open 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., but closed at lunchtime. Most merchants are open from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Some, especially hardware, department stores, and lumberyards stay open for part or all of asSaturday. Sunday closures are nearly absolute.

Shops and stores that vary from these hours are noted in their individual descriptions. Restaurants usually maintain hours that suit their clientele; early-rising Arkhamites find the notion of eating at 8:00 P.M. decadently continental and conceivably un-Christian. ]Commercial activity halts on Sunday. With certain exceptions, it is against the law (and the law will be enforced) to operate any business of any kind between the hours of 6:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. on the Sabbath. Then one hears the sound of money only in collection plates. However, on Sunday, with the express permission of the selectmen, Western Union receives and delivers wires, but does not transmit them; the telephone exchange is open and operating, as is the B&M rail line and the local taxi service; restaurants, speakeasies, gift shops, or other luxurious enterprises, with a single exception, never open on Sunday. Sunday dinners are family affairs, not commercial opportunities.

Finding a Place to Live

Investigators may wish to establish residence in Arkham. Hotels, apartment buildings, and boarding houses of varying quality exist; those with rooms to let are listed in the want-ad section of the Arkham Advertiser. The quality of an investigator’s housing depends upon annual income. An investigator can spend up to 35% of total income for lodging, food, and utilities without living beyond his or her means. An investigator may spend more or less than this percentage, but significantly greater or lesser allotments should reflect on Credit Rating, Diplomacy checks, which alters the chance for personal or commercial loans. Other ramifications of housing choice will arise from time to time; in a small town, everyone notices everything. Folks know the value of a dollar. Boarding house prices usually include two meals a day, housekeeping, and possibly laundry. Residence costs for an apartment and a hotel room vary proportionately for food, service, and utilities: deduct, espectively, five and fifteen percentiles from the percentage of income spendable.

Finding Employment

Many job opportunities exist in Arkham. Skilled investigators might procure work. Journalists could freelance or get a job with either of the newspapers; jobs exist in and around the University from academic positions to janitorial services, though competition for them may be keen. As the keeper wishes, any shop, store, business, or service could hire an investigator looking for work. Though costs are low compared to Boston, no investigator is going to make much money in Arkham, where hourly rates and salaries remain fixed for decades.

A janitor earns $1+1D100 cents per hour on a 48 hour week, for instance.A skilled senior craftsman might make up to $3.50 an hour. A cub reporter for either newspapermakes $20-25.00 a week (the lesser amount if from out of town, the higher if known to the editor a seasoned hand makes about $45.00 a week, not counting an occasional bonus. Reporters always work more than 40 hours weekly, and keep hours appropriate to newspaper deadlines. An untenured full-time university professor (academic load of fifteen or more classroom hours a week) earns about $300.00 a month.

No one in Arkham gets paid vacations, there is no social security, nor does recognizable hospital insurance exist. An investigator can, of course, insure individually against death or injury with any insurance agent, and build up cash equity usable as savings in an emergency. Emergency hospitalization does exist on a charity basis, but payment arrangements must be made.

When getting new employment, the investigator’s player should roll to establish the annual income of the job. Keepers might require annual re-rolls for freelancer income, to reflect the ups and downs of self-employment. Holding down any small-town job will be impossible if an investigator makes frequent journeys to solve Mythos mysteries, since businesses and shops are small, and every person has a vital job.

History

Colonial and Revolutionary Period

A considerably younger town than neighboring Kingsport or Innsmouth, colonials settled the Arkham area first in the late seventeenth century. They were 'liberal thinkers' fleeing the oppressive Congregationalists of Salem and Boston. Led by such educated men as Jeremiah Armitage, Jebel Whateley, Tristram Curwen, and Abel Peabody, these earliest settlers laid out the first streets on the slopes of what is now known as French Hill. Town meetings for “the Plantation of Arkham” were held once a month in a small wooden hall on “the first wet day of the month when all are to appear there at the beat of a drum.”

Among the least desirable of Arkham’s first generation were KeziahMason and Goody Fowler, suspected witches who brought with them from Salem a dark and hideous cult. In 1692, Mason was apprehended by the King’s men from Salem; Fowler fled into the forests northwest of town. Mason was gaoled but soonmysteriously escaped, never to be seen again.When the New England witch scare ended, Goody Fowler quietly returned to Arkham and resettled in her cottage southwest of town. Here she indulged in evil until, in 1704, an angry mob dragged her to a hill west of Arkham and there hanged her by the neck. Her murderers were never arraigned or punished. Yet the dark cult remained active. One member is thought responsible for summoning or creating the unnamable thing present in the attic of an old house on N Boundary Street. This thing later murdered 15 people in a nearby parsonage.

Arkham grew slowly through the early eighteenth century, overshadowed by nearby Kingsport’s successes with fisheries and trade. Arkham grew as a quiet farming community; when prices were good, a few fishing boats slipped down to the sea. For many years the only way to cross the Miskatonic was by way of Evan’s ferry, just large enough for a coach and four.

In 1761, Francis Derby and Jeremiah Orne returned to Arkham following successful careers as Salem sea captains. They brought five ships between them, determined to turn Arkham into another West Indies trade port. They built docks and warehouses along the north side of the river, in the area around Fish Street, and for a few years Arkham was host to ships plying the triangular trade, moving slaves to the Caribbean and the South, bringing molasses, sugar, and rum to New England, and exporting skins and dried cod to England. At the height of this trade the first permanent streets north of the river were established, and the first great Arkham mansions — the Derby and Orne homes and those of their captains — rose in the area now called East-town. Orne and Derby built the first bridge to span the Miskatonic River, a wooden creation near the site of the present Peabody Avenue bridge.

Jeremiah Orne died in 1765, leaving a library of 900 volumes and a bequest that, administered by trustees Francis Derby and George Locksley, was used to found Miskatonic Liberal College. The school was housed in a large two-story building on the south side of College Street, overlooking the old Common. A large second-story housed the Orne library and a small museum of oddities brought back from the West Indies and beyond by Arkham ships. This collection can still be seen at the Miskatonic University Exhibit Museum. John Adams Pickering, Harvard-educated and of the Arkham Pickerings, was chosen the college’s first president.

During the Revolutionary War, the Derbys and Ornes turned privateer. Operating mainly out of Kingsport, they sank or captured 23 vessels under the British flag, turning handsome profits. After the war, the families subsidized the purchase and development of the old Town Common previously used for pasturage and militia training—and soon installed a now healthily endowed Miskatonic College on the new campus. A new town square was laid out on the north side of the river, near the center of town, and, after much debate, named Independence Square.

The end of the war marked the decline of Arkham’s sea trade. Salem, Boston, and New York rapidly consolidated most of the China trade; the local remnant went to Kingsport. In 1808, the Federal Customs Office in Arkham was closed, and Arkham lost its status as a port of entry. Despite the loss of international trade, Arkham grew rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the vision of such men as Eli Saltonstall. Saltonstall, formerly a captain sailing for the Pickman family, foresaw the end of Arkham’s short-lived sea trade, opening in 1796 Arkham’s first textile mill, on the south side of the river at the foot of East Street. More mills opened soon after and, as New England farming declined, Arkham grew industries. The industrialists — the Saltonstalls, Browns, and Jenkins—laid out new streets south of the college campus along the top of South Hill, and there constructed grand Georgian and Federalist mansions, financed by large textile profits.

In this period, in 1806, the town’s first newspaper, the Arkham Gazette, was established, underwritten by the Federalist Derbys. Republican industrialists were later to help found the Arkham Bulletin. By this time the Federalist sea merchants were dwindling. Their last building spree saw the construction of the mansions that border the Common along Federal and Curwen Streets. By 1820, mills and supporting industries lined the south bank of the river, from Peabody Avenue east. Arkham became increasingly urbanized. By 1850, a telegraph line linked the town with Boston. Reputable scholars, in part drawn by Miskatonic College’s already famous library and by the proximity of the town to Boston, began to join the staff. Southwestern Arkham took on the feel of an Ivy League town.

Industry continued to expand. By 1850, brickyards, leather shops, shoe factories, watchmakers and, later, costume jewelry manufacturers lined the shores north and south on the eastern side of town. A great string of warehouses, eventually reaching West Street, were constructed along the south shore during this period.

American Civil War and Late 19th Century

In the American CivilWar, Arkham’s finest formed a company of the 23rd Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment. Twenty-seven young men died in the struggle; a memorial in Christchurch Cemetery commemorates their sacrifice.

After the Civil War, Miskatonic College became a full-fledged university. Gas street-lighting was nearly complete by 1870. Visitors were frequent enough that a cab service existed, working out of the rail depot. In 1873, Arkham created a municipal police after members of a then-illegal fraternity got drunk at Doc Howard’s Bar and sparked a riot that damaged many shops and stores along Church Street. A law was soon after passed limiting the proximity of taverns in the campus area.

In 1882, a strange meteorite landed west of Arkham, on a farm belonging to Nahum Gardner. Professors from the university investigated the meteorite but were unable to learn its true nature. In the end, the Gardner family succumbed to a strange disease that eventually left the area barren and scorched.

Unprecedented spring rains in 1888, coupled with offshore storms that drove the sea up the Miskatonic’s estuary, swelled the river far over its banks. The worst flooding ever recorded in Arkham caused extensive damage to the riverside mills. Southwestern Arkham, as far as part of the University campus, was inundated, damaging the basement archives of the library and destroying irreplaceable acquisitions. Arkham’s textile mills never fully recovered from the flood of 1888. New England had lost much of the trade to the South; most of Arkham’s firms, underinsured against the disaster, never reopened.

In the next years, new concrete drains and levees eased the danger of a second killer flood. A little later, trolley lines were installed, and the first homes turned from gas light to electricity. Telephone lines appeared. Before the end of the century, a public sanitary water system was completed. As though to spite these efforts, in 1905 a terrible typhoid epidemic swept Arkham, killing many in the sudden plague. Among the many victims was Dr. Allen Halsey, then dean of the Miskatonic School of Medicine and a public benefactor loved by all. A statue to his memory was erected on campus and presently overlooks the town he loved.

In the Great War, Arkham gave its share; a bronze plaque at City Hall and a Commons bronze doughboy commemorates those who fell.

The economic boom in the 1920s passed by most of New England, whose industrial base was by now in rapid decline, but reached Arkham by way of the university. Town and school became inextricably linked. Many Arkham shops cater greatly or exclusively to the needs of the university community. In 1928, the school is the heart of the town’s economy. Its administrators and faculty form part of the newest of Arkham’s aristocracies.

Arkham Today

Though New England's fortunes declined after the Great War, local survey shows that 83% of Arkham homeowners possess electric irons, 77% have gas or electric washing machines, and 51% have or plan to purchase vacuum cleaners. Nearly 50% of Arkham families own at least one automobile, and merchants complain of those who park their machines in front of shops all day. The interurban trolleys that once linked Arkham, Ipswich, Kingsport, Bolton, and Salem have been abandoned with the coming of the automobile. A bus line has recently re-established some of these routes.

Problems persistently arise between town and university. At present, the cost of campus police protection is being debated. The university’s young president, Dr. Wainscott, has dared to enter the controversy by running for mayor. Even if the election in November goes to the university, the perennial struggle for power between town and university will not end.

Though there is no boom, the new construction of apartment buildings, university buildings, and filling stations attests to general prosperity. However, much of this construction slows or dies after the stock market crash in 1929. Arkham feels the effects much less than other towns in the area, but it is hurt. Most of Arkham’s industries, employers of the poorer classes, lay off workers, and more than a few close their doors forever.

Geography

Arkham’s Climate

Arkham receives three or more inches of precipitation monthly throughout the year. Summer and fall thunderstorms are likely; occasionally a great hurricane swoops north.Winter storms occasionally can be severe.

Temperature varies more than rainfall. Early October shows Arkham’s trees in full autumn color. The hills become fabulous carpets of reds, yellows, and golds. Temperatures are brisk, with night-time lows in the 40s and daytime highs in the 60s. By November, fallen leaves litter everywhere, and the trees are nearly bare.

Occasional light snow-showers occur as early as late November, but the snow does not last, and Arkham rarely enjoys a white Christmas. January and February are cold, when low temperatures are normally 20°-30°F. Anything lower than 10°F is considered remarkable.

On the first weekend of February the town now celebrates Winterfest, a recently-established commercial festival. The merchants sponsor a parade, a snowmanbuilding contest, and an indoor pageant to select an annual Winter Queen to rule over the festival.

Winter thaws in March, but cool temperatures can last into early April. By the end of April, flowers begin to bloom and the trees begin to leaf.

May and June bring the first 70°F days, and July the first summer heat. In August, when the onshore breezes fail, temperatures can soar to 90°F and more. The air hangs in the valley, humid and stagnant, creating uncomfortably sticky days and nights. These periods are usually short, however, and temperatures above 85°F are exceptional. In general, the evenings cool off considerably and, especially near the river, a light jacket might be considered. The Miskatonic is often too cool for comfortable swimming, though hearty souls and young men showing off regularly make the plunge.

In September, the weather cools, and the first light frost may fall at the end of the month. This time is sunny and breezy, with scattered showers. Students return to school, leaves turn, and the cycle begins again.