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Ellen Garrison Exhibit
2016 @ 11:00 am - 2016 @ 4:00 pm
Free
In 2016, the Robbins House opened a new exhibit: Ellen Garrison – Educator, Social Justice Advocate, Daughter of Concord
Caesar Robbins’ granddaughter Ellen Garrison tested the nation’s first Civil Rights Act in 1866, barely a month after it was passed. Come learn the story of this remarkable activist and 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 her final years as an “exoduster” in Kansas. Books are being written about her now – let our interpreters show and tell you her exceptional story.
View more about our new exibit online here.
![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!](http://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)