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Freedom’s Way Hidden Treasures Weekend
2016
Free
May 22nd, The Robbins House – Freedom’s Way Hidden Treasures Weekend
Meet Ellen Garrison (1823-c.1890), Concord’s 19th-Century Civil Rights Activist. Caesar Robbins’ granddaughter Ellen was born in Concord’s Robbins House the year it was deeded, 1823. Our reenactor will portray Ellen Garrison and tell her story – from her childhood as a top student in Concord’s public school, through her activism in Boston, her time teaching southern newly freed people of color and challenging the 1866 Civil Rights Act in Maryland, to her final years in a free Black community in Kansas. Interpreters will lead tours of The Robbins House. Musical performance by cellist Emma Hodgdon playing songs of the Civil War era.
![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)