Politics, Money, and Anarchy: Historic House Museums
Humanities Director Elon Cook participates in NY panel, “Politics, Money, and Anarchy: Historic House Museums”
Thursday, January 14th, Robbins House Humanities Director, Elon Cook, took part in a panel discussing the best ways to ensure long-term stewardship of historic house museums.
The lively discussion, sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York, included historic house experts from across the East Coast, including Frank Vagnone, co-author of the Anarchist Guide to Historic House Museums, (Franklin Vagnone & Deborah Ryan, Left Coast Press, 2015). Click on the link below to watch a recording of the panel discussion and hear Elon speak from minutes 14-20.
![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)