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Civil Disobedience Walk
2022 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Meet historian Richard Smith and Nikki Turpin from the Robbins House at the Thoreau house replica near the main parking lot, for a conversation about Thoreau’s night in jail and his essay Civil Disobedience. This is an essay that Martin Luther King Jr. and so many activists read an admired.
Continue the conversation about civil disobedience historic and present day, on a guided walk on Walden’s accessible trail to the Thoreau house site. Program best suited for ages 8 and up.
Co-sponsored by Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Walden Woods Project
![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)