New Interactive Software Exhibit Available for Presentations
October 2017
The Robbins House partnered with Trivium Interactive to create an exciting new interactive exhibit that will tell the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement through the lives and stories of the residents of the Robbins House. The interactive program is scheduled for completion this October. The exhibit will be installed in the Robbins House as well as available for presentations to various community groups and institutions throughout Massachusetts to share the story of the Robbins House and the ongoing struggle for civil rights that continues to shape America today.
This exhibit is made possible through the MassHumanities grant, “Negotiating the Social Contract.”
Teacher and community member focus group discusses how the new Robbins House interactive exhibit can work in the classroom.
![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)