In Her Own Words: Mary Merrick Brooks and Strategies of Reform — with Sandra Harbert Petrulionis
Thursday, August 16th • Part of the Concord Museum’s “People of Concord” Summer Series
Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, author of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord was excited to talk about the fiery abolitionist Mary Merrick Brooks – and only Mary Merrick Brooks – for an entire evening. Reading from Brooks’ unpublished letters and what others wrote about her brought the founding member of Concord’s Female Antislavery Society to life. Daughter of a slaveholder and wife of a conservative lawyer, Brooks persisted in moving forward her political reform efforts through strategy, flattery, and outright begging, convincing many of Concord’s most visible, even reluctant, citizens to speak out against slavery.
![Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? We have you covered with a little Robbins house trivia. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled Peter’s Field. Peter’s Field most likely referenced Peter Hutchinson, who was the last African American owner of The Robbins House. Peter purchased the home in 1852 and lived with his wife, Nancy, and several of their children in the home until 1868. Emerson described Peter’s farm, and by extension the original area of farmland attached to The Robbins House out in the Great Field like this:
KNOWS he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?]
That field by spirits bad and good,
By Hell and Heaven is haunted,
And every rood in the hemlock wood
I know is ground enchanted.
[In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:
I wandered up,
I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.
For in those lonely grounds the sun
Shines not as on the town,
In nearer arcs his journeys run,
And nearer stoops the moon.
There in a moment I have seen
The buried Past arise;
The fields of Thessaly grew green,
Old gods forsook the skies.
Happy Reading!](http://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)