Origin
Lovecraft may have named the town after the lost port of Dunwich in Suffolk, England. This town was the subject (though not mentioned by name) of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "By the North Sea", which was in an anthology owned by Lovecraft. This Dunwich also appears in Arthur Machen's novella The Terror (1917), which Lovecraft is known to have read.
Lovecraft also could have been inspired by other New England towns with names ending in -wich, such as Ipswich near Salem, Massachusetts, East and West Greenwich in Rhode Island, and Greenwich, Massachusetts, a decaying rural village that has since been flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Although the English town is pronounced "DUN-nich" (similar to the New England Greenwiches), Lovecraft never specified how he preferred his Dunwich be pronounced.
Lovecraft is said to have based Dunwich on Athol, Massachusetts, and other towns in Western Massachusetts. S. T. Joshi has also seen Dunwich as being influenced by East Haddam, Connecticut, location of the "Devil's Hopyard," the "Moodus Noises," and a witch tradition.
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