Community Corner
Robbins House Relocated
Historic building successfully moved to new site near Old Manse.
Visitors to Concord could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about early Saturday morning, when a flatbed truck inched down Bedford Street into Monument Square carrying a weathered old brown house. Locals, though, looked on with awe as the old home, built in 1830 by Caesar Robbins, a Concord slavery survivor, made its way through the town center toward the Old Manse and its new address in the National Park system.
The relocation was the finale to a dramatic multi-year campaign by the nonprofit Drinking Gourd Project (DGP) to save the house from demolition as part of the group’s work to raise awareness of Concord’s black history. “I can barely breathe today,” said DGP co-founder Polly Attwood. “This feels like a mountain we’ve climbed.”
The DGP says the Caesar Robbins House is the only standing house built by an early African resident of Concord, and that Peter Hutchinson, who was the last member of the Robbins family to live in the house, was the first African-American resident of Concord to vote.
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The house was sold out of the Robbins family in the 1870s and its most recent occupant, who died a few years ago, left the property to her heirs in Scotland. When Attwood and DGP co-founders Maria Madison and Susan Ryan unearthed the ownership history of the house they also learned that it was slated to be torn down.
They fought to save it during months of negotiations and meetings with lawyers and town officials, and finally, with financial support from some generous Concord residents, a deal was reached to spare the house and repurpose it as the town’s African American and Abolitionist History Center.
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On Saturday morning the moving crew arrived early and the house was on the road by 8:30, crawling toward the town center behind a police escort and teams of Verizon workers who lifted any phone lines that hung in its path. Crowds of people followed behind or watched from the sidewalks as the building crept closer to Monument Square.
The building and its entourage paused at the foot of Bedford Street for some speeches. “This is a wonderful event for the town to participate in and the weather is cooperating,” said Town Manager Chris Whelan. “We look forward to having an interpretive site where the one million people who visit our community each year will also see its African American history.”
Concord resident Bill Barber also spoke up, pledging to personally match any donations to the DGP dollar for dollar as the house undergoes extensive renovations. “This is one of the most important projects in Concord in 200 years,” Barber said. “This is the real thing. How many towns in this country have anything like this left, let alone a lily-white town like this.”
Finally the moving truck took the hard right down Monument Street and much of the crowd followed the house to its new address, across the street from the Old Manse.
“I was watching this house move through town past all these ancient houses and this one still matters,” said Lois Brown, a Mount Holyoke English Professor and historian invited by the DGP. “It’s amazing that you can move a house and change the narrative, change history.”
