Abigail Robbins Lothrop (1814-1903)
Elder Sister
Eli and Hannah Robbins had seven children, and after their first daughter Hannah Maria was born deaf, Abigail filled the role of lieutenant mother as the next oldest sister. While her sister Julia was away visiting family members in Vermont, Abby wrote her chastising Julia for not writing home enough when her family suffered from serious illnesses. Because their sister Mary died, Abby also wrote Julia “I did not know but you would want to come home when you heard how sick we were and the death of your little sister Mary; but you will never see her again. I hope you will reflect upon it, read your Bible, and be a good girl, for you know not how soon you may be called upon to die, and in as sudden a manner as she was perhaps.”[1] In a religious age, older sisters often enforced expectations of piety and devotion upon their more playful siblings, and this was evidently the relationship between Abigail and Julia Robbins.
Abigail, like her sisters Ellen and Julia, attended Adams Female Academy in New Hampshire where an advanced curriculum and academic rigor were promoted. Despite pundits in the Jacksonian Age declaring that women were neither capable nor worthy of such advanced education, the Robbins family saw that education mattered, even for daughters. Abigail had shown talent enough as an organist to be hired around the time she turned twenty to provide music in the Baptist meeting house in downtown Lexington.[2]
After her years of education, Abigail married Rev. Stillman Luther Lothrop, son of Deacon Stillman Lothrop of Cambridgeport. The Deacon Lothrop was an outspoken critic of the churches that refused to criticize slave-owning, and he resigned his post at the Third Baptist Church of Boston over this issue and wrote letters to William Lloyd Garrison’s the Liberator.
Though Abigail and Stillman came from like-minded anti-slavery families, theirs was an uneasy partnership. Due to Eli Robbins’ bankruptcy, the Stone Building he built was deeded around 1840 to Lothrop rather than Abigail because married women could not own property. Despite having a wealthy father, Abigail’s husband searched with scant success for a vocation. He founded and taught in a coeducational private school called the East Lexington Institute held in the Stone Building in 1844-45. His shared work in the school with Lexington’s Baptist minister Charles Bowers, and together they promoted a more hospitable environment for hosting anti-slavery meetings. For example, the Middlesex County Anti-slavery Society annual meeting was held in the Baptist meeting house because of Rev. Bowers and later anti-slavery meetings and speakers came to the Stone Building. According to Emily Murphy “lectures from the likes of white abolitionists Parker Pillsbury in 1847, and formerly enslaved people like William Wells Brown in both Lexington and East Lexington in 1847 and William and Ellen Craft in 1849 were being held in “Lothrop’s Hall” as the building was then known. Ellen Stone even notes an antislavery fair happening in East Lexington in 1847, very likely in the same building.”[3]
The marriage of Abigail Robbins and Stillman Lothrop eventually disintegrated, and he later died in the Caribbean. Abigail for years afterward lived with other members of the Robbins family in the Stone Building or the Robbins Homestead and died in 1903.
[1]Mary E. Keenan, In Haste, Julia: Julia Robbins Barrett 1819-1900, Abolitionist, Artist, Suffragist. Lexington, Ma: Lexington Historical Society, 2011, p.
[2]Anne Doris MacDougall, The First Baptist church, Lexington, “The Way We Came: A history of the First Baptist Church, Lexington, Massachusetts, 1833-1983,” Privately printed, 1983, p. 8.
[3] Emily A. Murphy, Ph.D.;, White Paper #2 for Lexington Historical Society Exhibit “Something Must Be Done: Bold Women of Lexington;” Anne Grady and Walter Leutz. “Charles Follen, The East Village, and Abolitionism.” Follen Memorial Church. 05 22, 2017. https://follen.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Charles-Follen-the-East-Village-and-Abolitionism.pdf (accessed 11 12, 2019).
by Kathleen Dalton