Bolton

Bolton is a town in Massachusetts that is mentioned in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. While there is a real Bolton in central Massachusetts, Lovecraft's Bolton is often thought to be a separate, fictional town located in Lovecraft Country.
==In the Real World==
The real-world town of Bolton is Massachusetts' Worcester County, to the west of Boston and a considerable distance from the real and imaginary communities in Essex County that constitute Lovecraft Country. It was incorporated in 1738 and has never been a large place; the censuses from 1900 to 1940 each recorded a population in the 700s.Wikipedia, "Bolton, Massachusetts." An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia notes that "in HPL's day Bolton was a tiny agricultural hamlet with no industries of significance."An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Bolton," S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Hippocampus Press, 2004).
The location of the real Bolton features in the debate over whether Lovecraft originally conceived of Arkham as being in central Massachusetts before placing in the northeastern part of the state.An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Arkham," S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Hippocampus Press, 2004).
==In Lovecraft's Fiction==
Bolton appears first and most prominently in Lovecraft's "Herbert West--Re-Animator," where it's introduced as a "neighbouring town" to Arkham, where a circus manager denies that any of his animals could be responsible for the rampages that turn out to be the work of the reanimated Allan Halsey.
Later, after Herbert West and the narrator have graduated from Miskatonic University's medical school, they set up practice in Bolton, described as "a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college." It's home to the Bolton Worsted Mills, "the largest in the Miskatonic Valley," and the new doctors set up shop in the factory district, as the mill's "polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians." 
They move into "a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street" with no close neighbors, conveniently located near a source of material for West's experiments: It's "separated from the local potter’s field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north."
Boxing was outlawed in Bolton, due to "the prevailing spirit of Puritanism," but secret and illegal bouts were common there. Nevertheless, it's said that "Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town," a fact that gave West and his companion no little worry.
Bolton comes up again in "The Rats in the Walls," where it's the hometown of the narrator, Delapore, the New England business owner who restores Exham Priory. The mill town is representative of "the greyness of Massachusetts business life" that is Delapore's immediate background.
Lovecraft's final reference to Bolton comes in "The Colour Out of Space," where the phosphorescence of the Gardner farm is first noticed by "a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends." The reference reestablishes that Bolton is in the vicinity of Arkham, and also marks it as a place of relative normalcy from which eldritch phenomenon can be noted.
==References==
Category:Locations Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Structures