Concord Perspectives: The Garrison Men in Images and Objects
February 13, 2019 at the Concord Museum, Robbins House co-president Maria Madison moderated the Concord Museum’s special look at Robbins House residents Jack and John Garrison, a father and son whose lives as both free and enslaved men are deeply intertwined with the history of Concord in the 1800s. The Concord Museum Collection images are the only photographic images known of early black Concordians. While none of their objects were kept, the inventory list of the early African American Dugan family guided the Concord Museum in creating their exhibit, Thomas Dugan, Yeoman of Concord, available online here. The Garrison family would have owned many of the same household items.
The Concord Perspectives Series program was presented in partnership with The Robbins House Old Manse, and Concord Museum.
![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!](https://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)