Peter Hutchinson
Caesar Robbins’ extended family
1799 – 1882, 82 years
LAST AFRICAN AMERICAN OWNER
Peter Hutchinson and his large family were the last African Americans to own the Robbins house. Peter married Nancy Dager at the First African Baptist Church in Boston and they had six children. They lived in this house from 1852 to 1868.
PRIZEWINNING WORK
Described as “the ablest common laborer I have ever known,” Peter constructed buildings, slaughtered livestock, and sold pigs to other farmers. He won first prize in the plowing contest at the 1835 Middlesex agricultural fair. Peter signed petitions opposing railroad discrimination and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.
Peter “had more local knowledge of wood lots and meadow bounds than any man in town,” according to J.S. Keyes. During his time in the Robbins house, the farm lane became known as Peter’s Path, a spring was known as Peter’s Spring, and the woods nearby were called Peter’s Woods. Fifty years after his death, a local firewood business was named the Peter Hutchinson Company in his honor.
(representational image)
![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)