Meeting Thomas Dugan in Concord, 7 June

Tomorrow, 7 June, the Concord Museum and the Robbins House will co-sponsor a walking tour that explores Concord’s antislavery history. The route will begin at the museum, which is hosting a special exhibit called “Thomas Dugan, Yeoman of Concord,” and end at the Robbins House, built for the children of Caesar Robbins.

In 1769, when Robbins was in his early twenties, he married a Concord woman named Phillis. They were both enslaved, he to Simon Hunt and she to the Rev. William and Phebe Emerson.

Having fought as a teenager in the French and Indian War, Robbins served in an Acton militia company at the end of the siege of Boston. Caesar Robbins became free during the war. He raised his family in Concord, dying in 1822.

Back in 2009 I noted the effort to save the Robbins family house. That campaign succeeded, and the house is now one of Concord’s historic attractions.

Thomas Dugan came to Concord by 1791, having been enslaved in Virginia. He was about forty-four years old. He married, raised a family, and worked a seven-acre farm until his death in 1827.

The exhibition “Thomas Dugan, Yeoman of Concord” attempts to visualize the furnishings of Dugan’s house and barn as listed in the probate inventory. The items, for the most part, are drawn from the Concord Museum collection, with additional loans from private collections, and have local histories; one piece—the fowler valued in 1827 at $1.50—is an actual artifact that belonged to Thomas Dugan. . . .

Dugan is referred to as a yeoman on the inventory of his estate; a yeoman is a property-owning farmer. The value of his property indicates that Dugan was a good farmer; he was a land owner—fewer than half of his Concord contemporaries, white or black, could say the same—and he died without any debts, rare at the time when surviving on credit was normal. Long after he died he was recalled as an expert grafter of apple trees, one who “did much to advance the farming interests in Concord; he was industrious and a peace maker.”

Objects in the exhibit include a “rye cradle” (shown above), which was a tool for harvesting grain that people credited Dugan with introducing to Concord. There will be a short gallery talk on Tuesday, 9 June, at 2:00 P.M.

The walking tour will take place on Sunday from 2:00 to 3:30 P.M. The cost is $10 for Concord Museum Members, $15 for others, and includes admission to the museum. Reserve a space by calling 978-369-9763, ext. 216. The sponsors urge participants to wear comfortable shoes. 

Caesar Robbins and “Our Wood-Lot”

Following yesterday’s posting about fundraising to preserve the c. 1780 Caesar Robbins house in Concord, here’s an anecdote about Robbins that Franklin B. Sanborn quotes in his biography of Henry David Thoreau.

It comes from another writer, whom I haven’t been able to identify, describing the fine qualities of the man who owned the large property beside Robbins’s lot, Humphrey Barrett (1752-1827):

The following acts of his life make apparent some traits of his character. A negro, by the name of Caesar Robbins, had been in the habit of getting all the wood for his family use for many years from Mr. Barrett’s wood-lot near by him; this being done with the knowledge and with the implied if not the express consent of the owner.

Mr. Barrett usually got the wood for his own use from another part of his farm; but on one occasion he thought he would get it from the lot by Caesar’s. He accordingly sent two men with two teams, with directions to cut only hard wood.

The men had been gone but a few hours when Caesar came to Mr. Barrett’s house, his face covered with sweat, and in great agitation, and says, “Master Barrett, I have come to let you know that a parcel of men and teams have broke into our wood-lot, and are making terrible destruction of the very best trees, and unless we do something immediately I shall be ruined.”

Mr. Barrett had no heart to resist this appeal of Caesar’s; he told him not to be alarmed, for he would see that he was not hurt, and would put the matter right. He then wrote an order to his men to cut no more wood, but to come directly home with their teams, and sent the order by Caesar.

Several details in this story match what’s in other anecdotes about African-Americans in rural New England published in the nineteenth century. We have the simple, emotional black man, referred to by his first name. In contrast, we see the magnanimous white man in calm control—and he gets the honorific “Mr.” at every reference. All no doubt reassuring for white readers.

Of course, in the decades around 1800 when this incident most likely took place, no one was more aware of power differences than Robbins—he’d navigated in white-dominated society all his life. It’s only logical that he would act deferential towards Barrett when he needed something, while nonetheless pushing his claim to that wood.

And in this story, Robbins got what he needed.

(Picture above of a Walden Woods Red Maple from American Forests Historic Tree Store.)

Saving Caesar Robbins’s House

Earlier this week, following stories in the local press, the Boston Globe reported on an effort in Concord to preserve the house of Caesar Robbins. The paper said:

the brown shingled house on Bedford Street, built in the 1780s by the town’s first freed slave, is the last of its kind, a crucial but long-forgotten link to the town’s early black community and abolitionist movement. With the house in danger of being demolished, its history has emerged from obscurity, and advocates have mounted a spirited campaign to stave off its demise.

The owners, who were bequeathed the property, had applied for a permit to level the one-story house in hope of selling the land, while the town wants to save the house for posterity. A six-month stay issued by the town expired Saturday, and while there are no immediate plans to level the house, advocates are scrambling to raise $30,000 for moving costs to keep it from harm.

I’m not sure what the “first freed slave” phrase refers to. John Jack of Concord bought his freedom before dying in 1773; that part of his life is told on a famous gravestone (actually a replica of the original) in the Concord cemetery, erected by Loyalist lawyer Daniel Bliss as a way to stick it to liberty-loving Patriots. Here’s an old paper about Jack and Bliss.

Robbins became free in 1780 after serving in the Revolutionary War, and built the house about that time. Three years later, the Massachusetts Superior Court ruled that the state’s new constitution outlawed slavery. Robbins and his wife Rose raised their family in the house, dying within two days of each other in 1822. His age was then recorded as seventy-six, hers as eighty-one.

Caesar Robbins passed the house to his descendants, and then to other African-American families. In the mid-1800s it was home to Peter Hutchinson, a butcher Henry David Thoreau wrote about; Hutchinson’s name is on the structure’s current historic sign. The house was moved to its present spot in 1870, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

A house lot in Concord is worth a lot more than an old house today, and the people who inherited the property most recently are hoping to build something new on that land. So folks have undertaken to raise funds to move the Robbins house again and make it a museum. The Globe says:

The town hopes to relocate the house to property it owns near the Old Manse, a 1770 house on the Concord River near the Old North Bridge. The town leases the land to the Minute Man park, which has expressed strong interest in adding the house as a destination.

Donations for this effort are being collected at:

Concord-Carlisle Human Rights Council
P.O. Box 744
Concord, MA 01742

If you choose to donate, put “The Drinking Gourd Project” on the check’s memo line.

The photograph above is by Ann Ringwood for the Concord Journal.