Prominent
merchant,
captain, and
religious leader in 19th century
rural Massachusetts.
Marsh was the
richest and most
powerful citizen of
Innsmouth, Massachusetts for many years, partly because of his skill in
business and partly because he traded rubber and glass trinkets for
gold in the
Polynesian islands. By 1838, the Polynesian
natives he traded with had died, and Marsh's supply of gold dried up. This plunged the entire
town of Innsmouth into an
economic depression.
At this point, Marsh founded a
religion based on stories he had heard from the Polynesian natives, preaching that if the citizens followed the
undersea gods worshipped by the
islanders in the Pacific, they would become rich and
fishing would be
plentiful. Marsh's
Esoteric Order of Dagon grew so
popular that all the other churches in town closed, either because of lack of members or because of the Order's
strongarm tactics. After a
plague killed half of the town's
population in 1846, Marsh made himself Innsmouth's leader and only
well-off citizen. Marsh died in 1878, but his
family and his
church ruled the town until the
government, fearing the
cult's
influence,
raided (and essentially
destroyed) the town in 1927-28.
"The Shadow over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft
Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms, pp. 130-131