Restoring The Robbins House
The Robbins House is being adapted, preserved, and restored through Concord Community Preservation Funding, unanimously approved through Town Meeting. The process has so far included archeology, dendrochronology, paint analysis, and architectural expertise.
The move route took the historic house from Bedford Street where it has stood for decades, to the Minute Man National Historical Park on Monument Street. The house was loaded on a flatbed truck and journeyed 2.2 miles through Concord Center to its new site.
The sawdust and sunlight were present as fresh-cut wood signaled the start of the move of the Robbins House from 324 Bedford Street to 320 Monument Street on May 21st, 2011
Friday, July 22nd, the Robbins/Hutchinson House was lowered onto its beautiful new stone foundation! Since May 21st, when the house made its stately way from its old position on Bedford Street, to its current position by the North Bridge parking lot, the house has been sitting on air (and a few jacks), waiting for this moment.
A lot of preparation work has been done, both to the house, and to the site it sits on, and a trench was dug as a conduit for electrical power. The rotten sill has been replaced and modern shingles have been removed. There is still much to be done, both inside the house, on the exterior, and to the site, but we have amazing experts guiding the process.
Though we have a long way to go before the house can be open to the public, the lowering onto the foundation was a big milestone – a veritable Kodak moment!
Construction progress on the Robbins House: The contractors layer three courses of shingles on the lower edge and continue up the roof with a single overlapping layer. The first row is the critical and hardest row to set given the fact that the house doesn’t have a perfect perpendicular or parallel line in it’s structure. The remainder of the front shingles progress quickly.
Exterior construction at the Robbin/Hutchinson House Interpretive Center shows the completion of clapboards on the south and west elevations. The exterior envelope – clapboards, windows, doors and roof – were complete by the end of February.
![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)