For the last fifteen years, The Robbins House has proudly told the stories of Black Concord through the lens of the Robbins and Garrison families. Originally located on an isolated farm overlooking the Great Meadows along the Concord River, the house is one of the only known historic sites commemorating the legacy of a previously enslaved Revolutionary War veteran named Caesar Robbins. 

Transcendentalist and feminist writer Margaret Fuller—Emerson’s friend and collaborator, Bronson Alcott’s colleague, Thoreau’s first editor, and Ellery Channing’s sister-in-law—was central to Concord’s literary and intellectual life. She first came to Concord in the summer of 1836, when she met Emerson and stayed with his family for three weeks. 

Two white horses pulled the hearse into Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a top-hatted driver at the reins. A band of mourners followed on foot as they made their way toward Authors’ Ridge.

Except for the bright sunshine, this scene wouldn’t seem out of place in a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. But it happened a mere twenty years ago, on June 26, 2006. That was the day Hawthorne and his wife and daughter were reunited after his death separated them 142 years earlier.