Nameless No More: Drinking Gourd Project Dedicates Hutchinson Grave Marker

By Harry Beyer, Friends of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery Board Member

In passing Concord’s Peter Spring Road near Great Meadows – or in living there – have you ever wondered who “Peter” was? His name was Peter Hutchinson, a Concord citizen of African descent. 

As Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their contemporaries would have told you, Peter Hutchinson was a well-liked, respected farmer and an exceptionally able, all-round workman in 19th century Concord. One townsman called him “the ablest common laborer I have ever known.”

Hutchinson was the “Peter” referred to in the title of Emerson’s poem, Peter’s Field. In Walden, Thoreau referred to Peter as a “dexterous pig butcher.” He was also a skilled woodcutter, fisherman, and sheep shearer. He nearly beat farmer George Barrett in a contest, shearing 60 sheep in one day, to Barrett’s 62. A few years after Hutchinson’s death, J.M. Keyes recalled that Peter “had more local knowledge of wood lots and meadow bounds than any man in town, and much of it died with him.” As historian Ruth Wheeler noted in the 1960s, “Peter’s name will be remembered long after most of his contemporaries are forgotten.”

Until recently, “Peter Hutchinson” was the name on the historic plaque on the small house on Bedford Street, at the lowest point of the road as it passes Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.  He was the last African-American to own that home. The house, which originally stood on the edge of The Great Meadow, was moved by the Drinking Gourd Project in 2011 across the street from the Old North Bridge on Monument Street. It is being made into the Robbins House Interpretive Center, focusing on Concord’s early African history. Robbins family members, relatives of Peter, were the original owners of the house.

In 1882, Peter was buried in a plot in the New Burying Ground (1823). In following years, other Hutchinson family members were also buried in that plot. Yet, in the more than 130 years since, there has been no stone or other sign marking their resting place. Until now!

During the past year, two organizations – the Friends of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and the Drinking Gourd Project – have teamed up to have an engraved stone placed on the Hutchinson Family plot. On Saturday November 9th at 2:00 p.m., the gravestone will be dedicated in a short ceremony. Professor Robert Gross of the University of Connecticut, award-winning author of The Minutemen and Their World, The Transcendentalists and Their World, and other works of early American history, will speak. You are invited to join in this dedication at the gravesite, celebrating the life and accomplishments of Peter Hutchinson and his family.

To attend the dedication, enter Sleepy Hollow cemetery through the westernmost gate (closest to Concord Center), turn right, and proceed a short distance down the lane called Union Avenue. Parking is available to the left of this road on Vesper Circle. The Hutchinson family gravesite is located near the top of the hill on your left, where you’ll see a speaker’s podium. A reception will follow at First Parish Church, with a musical version of Emerson’s poem Peter’s Field sung by Dillon Bustin, and 19th century spirituals performed by Milton Wright. Brooks Cake, originally made in the 1830s by Concord’s leading antislavery activist Mary Merrick Brooks to raise money for the cause, will be served. The Friends of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and the Drinking Gourd Project hope to see you there!