In Concord, a bid to save tie to abolitionist days

By Peter Schworm

Globe Staff / September 14, 2009

CONCORD – Amid such historical touchstones as Walden Pond and the Old North Bridge, the quaint cottage barely merits a second glance, just another Revolutionary-era New England house in a town steeped in the past.

But 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.

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The Caesar-Robbins House in Concord listed as a Massachusetts Most Endangered Historic Resource on September 11, 2009 – The house was the home of several generations of Concord’s early African-American families as well as connections to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson! To help save this historic resource please visit http://drinkinggourd.cchumanrights.org