Robbins House board members attend IMLS AAHC Conference
IMLS Convening for Museum Grants for African American History and Culture (AAHC)
Wednesday, May 25th, Washington DC
Our exciting IMLS (Institute for Museums and Library Services) grant has allowed us to hire a scholar in residence assisted by a humanities expert, create costumed reenactor programming, develop school curriculum resources, and plan to update and republish material in the 1976 book, Concord: Its Black History. This conference is an opportunity for us to share experiences with other grantees, learn from each other, and strengthen our professional network.
Robbins House board members Maria Madison and Liz Clayton, along with Humanities Director Elon Cook, will not only attend this conference, but will take a day to follow the 1860’s trail of Ellen Garrison to…
- The Baltimore train station where Ellen was thrown out of the segregated section of the waiting room, to
- the Baltimore City Criminal Court, to research the court dockets and court minutes and try to determine – finally! – whether the court case against the train stationmaster ruled for or against Ellen Garrison and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and then finally to
- Port Deposit, Maryland to find the site of the schoolhouse where Ellen taught newly freed men, women and children after the Civil War.
![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)