If you are driving through Ashland Mass you might notice something odd pop up on your GPS: a designation called “Workman’s Circle Camp” and if you zoom in you will see streets arranged in a semi-circle. If this made you really curious and you turn off the main road to drive through you won’t find anything that looks remotely like a camp of any kind.

This is a ghost on the map and its real name is a further ghost. In Yiddish it would have been called Der Arbiter Ring.

The 19th century saw a flood of European immigrants the east coast of the united states. Like many of these immigrant groups Jews from central Europe found themselves in the middle of what were at the time, the most crowded cities on the planet. These were cramped places full of tenements, sweatshops, poverty, oppression, crime and unfamiliar faces speaking dozens of different languages or dialects.

Out of this chaos emerged a movement to not only escape the city but to preserve culture. In 1927 the site of an old mill in Ashland was purchased by the Jewish Workmans Circle and became the site of a kind of tent city called the Golden Ring Camp.

Listen to the episode to find out the full story and get all the information at Lostmassachusetts.com

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