Ellen Tested our Nation’s First Civil Rights Bill
Baltimore, MD Train Station
Robbins House Humanities Director Elon Cook visited Baltimore’s President Street train station in costume, where Ellen Garrison defended her right to sit in the ladies’ waiting room on May 7, 1866. The Civil Rights Bill of 1866, enacted on April 9th, was the first US federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected – it was mainly intended to protect the civil rights of African Americans in the wake of the Civil War.
Robbins House Humanities Director Elon Cook poses as Ellen Garrison at the Baltimore President Street Train Depot where Ellen tested the country’s first Civil Rights Act in 1866. Reenactment courtesy of The Robbins House’s IMLS grant.
Robbins House Humanities Director Elon Cook poses as Ellen Garrison at the Baltimore President Street Train Depot where Ellen tested the country’s first Civil Rights Act in 1866. Reenactment courtesy of The Robbins House’s IMLS grant.
Programming made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services
![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)