Preservation Massachusetts in partnership with the Cape Cod Commission will sponsor a workshop on historic buildings and green design in March.

Where: Harwich Community Center, Harwich, MA
When: Thursday March 25, 2010  11am-3pm
 
Workshop Program

11:00am – Welcome and Introduction

Sarah Korjeff, Cape Cod Commission & Jim Igoe, Preservation Massachusetts

11:15am – 12:45pm - Greening the Older Home

• Rebecca Williams, National Trust for Historic Preservation
• Sally Zimmerman, Historic New England
• Christopher Skelly, Massachusetts Historical Commission

1:00pm – 1:30pm Buffet Lunch

1:30 – 2:00pm – The 150-year-old Energy Efficient Window

• Jade Mortiner, Heartwood Window Restoration

2:00pm – Energy Efficiency Programs at Work for You in Green Buildings

• Kevin Galligan, Cape Light Compact

Directions:

Harwich Community Center, 100 Oak Street, Harwich

• Take Route 6 to Exit 10, go South on Route 124 toward Harwich Center;
• Take left at first stop sign onto Queen Anne Road;
• Go about 1/2 and take a right onto Oak Street, the Community Center will be on the right.

www.capecodcommission.org

At first glance, the small cottage across from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery looks rather modest and unassuming. But once you start to learn a little about the history of the Caesar Robbins House, it draws you in.  New research about this historic house, which was recently up for sale and threatened by the possibility of demolition, has uncovered a fascinating story of slavery and freedom, from the “shot heard round the world” to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Today the town of Concord is one of the most famously “historic” places in Massachusetts and the country. Visitors can learn about the history of the Revolutionary War at Minute Man National Historical Park and see the authors’ houses and landscapes of the small town that became a center for literary talent and philosophical ideas in the mid- nineteenth century. In such a well-known place, one might think that “history” is over. The work of local preservationists and public historians to document and protect the Caesar Robbins House is a reminder of how preservation work can yield new stories and suggest new possibilities for understanding our past.

Caesar Robbins built this small house at the edge of the Great Meadows not long after the battles of Lexington and Concord. He had fought in the Revolutionary War, and earlier in his life he had been enslaved. He was a free man of African descent who lived during the time that Massachusetts first debated, and then eventually, by court decision in 1783, prohibited slavery. His first wife Phillis was enslaved by the Bliss-Emerson family, as was their daughter.

Caesar Robbins’s descendants lived in this small house for a little over a century, from 1780 to 1881, until it sold to another family and moved to its current location. Among his descendants was Peter Hutchinson, who became the first person of African descent to vote in Concord. He was also subject of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Peter’s Field.”

Until recently, the house was known as the Peter Hutchinson House, marked with a small historic plaque. Word had passed down through the years that the house was connected to Concord’s history and should be protected, and it was identified in a town bylaw as a property subject to demolition review. But the property was not part of any historic district, nor was it listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Town residents regarded it as an important site, but it was also generally agreed that more historical research was needed.

Over the past several months, members of the Drinking Gourd Project, a local group dedicated to the interpretation and public awareness of Concord’s African American and Abolitionist history, has worked diligently to protect and preserve the house. In the process, they have uncovered the story of Caesar Robbins and his descendents, highlighting the complex ways in which freedom has been understood in Massachusetts and how it shaped the experiences of African Americans living in New England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Click here for more information on the Caesar Robbins House and the Drinking Gourd Project.

Click here for a map of African American and Abolitionist historic sites in Concord.

The Caesar Robbins House is just one of many historic properties associated with African American history that Preservation Massachusetts is working to preserve. The house was listed as one of Massachusetts Most Endangered Historic Resources in September 2009.

Steve Moga is the Circuit Rider for Eastern, Mass.

Royall House in Medford

 Circuit Rider Michele Barker has noted in her post on the James Weldon Johnson House, Massachusetts has a long and not always well-recognized African-American heritage. For this February E-Newsletter, PM has chosen to highlight the rich trail of African-American sites in the Commonwealth like the Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford. The Royall House and Slave Quarters includes a significant Georgian mansion (Loyalist) and the only extant Slave Quarters in the North which vividly illustrate the lives of the Royalls and the enslaved Africans who lived here over two and a half centuries ago.

For the first time in nearly 25 years, Preservation Massachusetts has been able to disperse matching grant funds as part of its Statewide Circuit Rider Program, in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This past January, a “mini grant” in the amount of $1,000 was awarded to the Royall House Association to restore and interpret the house’s kitchen.  The project also sougth to furnish the room to better interpret its use and purpose by slaves working for the Royall family. The objective of the restoration is to provide accurate physical evidence to more fully illustrate the duality of the history of this important property and its further meaning.

For more information on tours of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, please visit their website www.royallhouse.org.

Listed on Preservation Massachusetts’ 2005 Most Endangered Historic Resources, the Samuel Harrison House in Pittsfield is a great success story. The small, mid-19th century, Greek Revival house with a stone foundation is significant due to its associations to the Rev. Samuel Harrison and the American Abolitionist Movement. Samuel Harrison, an African American clergyman, contributed an important voice to the philosophical and political debate over race relations during the last half of the 19th century. Once threaten with demolition, vandalism, arson, dumping and vagrancy, the Samuel Harrison House is currently undergoing restoration with plans to use it as a house museum. For more information on how you can support the ongoing efforts to save the Samuel Harrison House, visit their website.

At the westernmost edge of my Circuit Riding territory, Berkshire County has a long, though not always well-recognized African-American heritage. In the 18th century, Elizabeth “Mum Bett” Freeman of Sheffield successfully sued for her freedom in a landmark case that declared slavery unconstitutional in Massachusetts. In the 19th century, more Berkshire County soldiers enlisted in the 54th Regiment (commemorated by the 1989 film “Glory”) than from any other part of the state. Samuel Harrison, chaplain to the 54th, settled in Pittsfield. In the 20th century, civil rights activists like Mary Wright Orvington, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. DuBois had homes in the Berkshires. (For more information on the Berkshire’s African-American Heritage, see the website of the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail.)

Some of the buildings associated with these figures are gone; the DuBois Homestead holds only a monument to the house that once stood there. Others, like the Harrison House in Pittsfield, are being preserved. And one—the Great Barrington summer writing retreat of James Weldon Johnson–is hanging by a thread.

Lawyer, educator, author, and activist James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) wrote fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. As an ethno-musicologist, Johnson traced the origins of African-American sacred music, collecting two volumes of songs for The Book of Negro Spirituals (1925). Johnson became head of the NAACP during the 1920s and led a national anti-lynching campaign. In 1926, he bought five acres of land with a 19th-century barn in Great Barrington, converted the barn into a home, and created a rustic writing cabin that he used as a summer writing retreat until his death in 1938. He wrote most of his God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse at his retreat at “Five Acres.”

Johnson described finding the site in his autobiography, Along This Way: “In 1926 I bought a little place in the township of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I rode one day by an overgrown place where a little red barn was all that stood out amongst the weeds; the house on the place had burned down. A bright little river ran under a bridge and circled round behind the barn. On inquiry, I learned that there were five acres in the tract, and I said, ‘This is just the place for me.’ Grace and I studied the possibilities and decided that we could remodel the barn, keeping the interior, with the old hand-hewn beams, just as it was. We did, and named the place Five Acres. There, we have made our home ever since for a part of the year.”

The converted barn and rustic cabin still stand on the banks of the Seekonk Brook. From the outside, the house looks like a modest Cape-style residence, though its timber frame and rustic interior reveal its 19th-century origins as a barn. A tiny orchard of elderly apple trees shades a grassy field next to the house, which is separated from the woods and the cabin by the brook. The cabin, tucked away among the pines, provides a sheltered, secluded place for quiet contemplation and creativity, though it’s only a short walk from the house and road. The cabin is so well-hidden, in fact, that the creators of the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail had initially thought that it had been demolished.

Unfortunately, demolition could yet be the fate of both cabin and house. The Johnson House went on the market last summer. Because of the house’s modest size and its need for substantial repairs, concerned residents fear that it could become a teardown. The orchard, brook, and woods that make the site so lovely also make it a prime site for a Berkshires summer McMansion. At the moment, there are no historic protections on the property that would keep the house from being demolished.

Realtor Will Brinker has been working hard to find a buyer who will appreciate the significance of the site and preserve the Johnson house and writing cabin. I’ve been trying to help Mr. Brinker in his search, contacting non-profit groups in the area and brainstorming with colleagues about possible ways to save the property. While a number of individuals and organizations have expressed concern, at the moment, we haven’t been able to locate any with the means to take on the project. Will and I have been trying to publicize the property to a wider audience, resulting in the house being featured on the local NPR affiliate and in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s online magazine, Preservation.

Any ideas and suggestions PM members and readers have to offer will be greatly appreciated, especially if anyone out there knows of a potentially sensitive buyer. Please contact me at mpbarker (at) preservationmass (dot) org or Will Brinker at will (at) applehillrealty(dot)com.

Michele Barker is the Circuit Rider for Central and Western, Mass.

To read Steve’s article on the Robbins-Hutchinson House click here.