July 28, 2016

Partners and supporters joined The Robbins House Board of Directors for an opening evening presentation of our new Meet Ellen exhibit. Exhibit committee members described the formative events in Ellen Garrison’s life (1823-c.1895) that led to her test of the country’s first Civil Rights Act in 1866. Board President and founder Maria Madison led the group in a ceremony of pouring libations to celebrate the life and achievements of Ellen Garrison. See the article in the Concord Journal

Ellen Garrison, Caesar Robbins’ granddaughter, tested the nation’s first Civil Rights Act in 1866, barely a month after it was passed. The life story of this remarkable activist is told through original documents: how she was shaped by her childhood in Concord, her time with the Boston Antislavery Society and Joy Street Church, her passion for teaching newly freed people in the South after the Civil War and bringing a lawsuit against the train depot guard who “forcibly threw her out” of the waiting room that was no longer segregated after the recent 1866 Civil Rights Act, and her final years as an “exoduster” in Kansas.