Eli Robbins

            Eli Robbins (1786-1856), son of Stephen and Abigail (Winship) Robbins, was a businessman and community leader in East Lexington. He held abolitionist views, promoted education, and made many contributions to the development of the East Village. Eli married Hannah Simonds in 1809 and had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood.

Their home, located on the west side of Pleasant Street and Massachusetts Avenue, included elaborate grounds with walking paths and a summer house with an observatory and flagstaff. Robbins delighted in social events, teaching dancing and playing the violin, opening his grounds to the public, and hosting Fourth of July festivities and church benefits.[1]

            At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Eli’s father Stephen Robbins owned a thriving fur-dressing business in East Lexington. Eli Robbins took over the business in 1810, modernizing some of the processes. To process the fur Eli built lye and tanning facilities and hired Irish immigrants and other workers to prepare the furs to make hats, boots, muffs, and gloves. At one time more than 300 workers labored in the fur business in East Lexington.[2] Eli also sold imported dry goods and groceries and opened the Brick Store in East Lexington in 1828. Eli Robbins invested in real estate, farming, mills, and taverns, while his father continued to supervise a peat harvesting trade. Eli Robbins was one of the first to experiment with using a rubber substance for water-proofing garments, but other inventors surged ahead of him.[3] 

            By the 1830s Eli Robbins played an important role in developing the character and identity of the East Village, the center of manufacturing for the town of Lexington. Albert W. Bryant wrote, “No one ever contributed more towards making Main Street in East Lexington what it is at the present time than he. Many of the large shade trees were set out by him, and many of the buildings he erected; his lands were always for sale at reasonable prices, and in every possible way he was ever ready to lend a helping hand to others.”[4] Eli Robbins played a role as a builder of his community at a time when upheavals caused by the new industrial order, nativist hostility toward immigrants, and deep political conflicts over slavery made Massachusetts politics rancorous.

            One of Robbins’s most lasting contributions to East Lexington was the building of Robbins Hall in 1833. It later became known as the Stone Building and housed the East Lexington Branch Library for more than a century. Robbins hired Isaac Melvin to design and build the hall in the latest Greek Revival fashion. With a residence on the first floor and a large lyceum room on the second floor, it provided space for lectures, meetings, public education, and entertainment. Eli Robbins built the Stone Building within a national context. Public education became more important in the 1830s, as states dropped property qualifications for voting and more illiterate and uneducated white men were voting. In fact, high schools in towns like Lexington were not established and compulsory attendance laws would not be passed until many decades later.

            Robbins evidently built the second-floor lyceum room for his neighbors to get together and gain practical knowledge, to hear about new scientific discoveries, and to enlarge their understanding of the world around them. The gathering of neighbors was a central goal of a national lyceum movement. A long-term supporter of the nearby Concord lyceum recalled that “the old and the young have come here together to see each other’s faces, the young men and maidens sometimes, perhaps, with other views than strictly intellectual culture, but all of us friendly, neighborly, and engaged in a pursuit innocent and wholesome.”[5] Robbins left no mission statement, but the growing national lyceum movement urged new voters to study and support democracy, and many lyceums sponsored polite debates and the study of literature and classical history. Avoiding conflict, many lyceums encouraged moral uplift and “republican virtue” as an alternative to vice and drunkenness. Lyceums encouraged self-improvement through learning and entertainment in a setting open to all classes and ages of people.[6] 

            The Stone Building also provided Lexington with a timely community asset because free speech was at risk in the 1830s. Those were the years when mobs attacked and even killed abolitionists.

The eloquent abolitionist speaker and editor Frederick Douglass suffered a broken wrist, and preachers who spoke out for anti-slavery cause had their congregants beaten by mobs and their churches burned.[7] White anti-slavery leader William Lloyd Garrison had to be rescued by his Black anti-slavery allies when a Boston mob tried to lynch him. Rotten vegetables were hurled toward Lucy Stone when she risked her life to speak against slavery, and when the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in 1838 angry mobs burned down the hall where women had spoken.[8]

            In the years after the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt, many pro-slavery advocates, north and south, blamed abolitionists for the violence.[9] After riots broke out in Boston when anti-slavery speakers held public events, the Governor of Massachusetts Edward Everett called on the state legislature to punish anti-slavery speakers for causing civil disturbance, that is, to criminalize all anti-slavery public speaking because he believed it provoked violence. In the South many states passed laws to punish by death those who distributed anti-slavery pamphlets.[10] A few Boston newspapers even editorialized in favor of Everett’s proposal to ban public anti-slavery speech.

            Despite the tense atmosphere, Eli Robbins and his family read William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and made friends with many of the most outspoken Garrisonian abolitionists in greater Boston, including Garrison’s main organizer Rev. Samuel May and Rev. Charles Follen, a German Professor at Harvard College whose anti-slavery views lost him his job. May and Follen, among others, gained national attention when they spoke against Governor Everett’s proposal at a legislative hearing. Follen and May declared unequivocally that anti-slavery activists advocated peaceful change.  They argued further that prohibiting free speech was blatantly unconstitutional. Legislators at first silenced Follen, but his views won the day.

Governor Everett and his supporters in the legislature backed down. After that dramatic confrontation, no northern state banned anti-slavery speech, and Rev. May declared that “the cause of civil and religious liberty is identified with the anti-slavery cause.”[11]

            The success of Follen and May in Massachusetts, however, did not prevent Congress from issuing a “gag rule” against the consideration of any anti-slavery petitions sent to Congress.  For years afterward Congressman (and former president) John Quincy Adams railed against the fact that he, too, was prohibited from speaking about slavery, in effect, gagged unconstitutionally on the floor of Congress by his congressional peers.[12] Heated national debate raged on until the late 1840s, over the gag rule, over slave-owners’ expansion of their territory in the annexation of Texas, and over the pro-slavery Mexican War. Eli and Hannah Robbins stood with the Garrisonians who defended the right of free speech, especially their right to speak out against slavery. Greater Boston’s anti-slavery community knew that most public buildings, churches, schools, and halls would be closed to them, but not the Stone Building.[13] 

            Local historians recalled that in the early nineteenth century, an “Abolitionist” was not usually allowed freedom of speech in Lexington, while the Stone Building became a center for free speech because Eli Robbins and his family members insisted upon it in their lyceum. More than anything else, the Stone Building represented the ideals of freedom and education for the Robbins family. Looking back, local Lexington historians judged the Stone Building’s importance in the history of the town. George Smith remembered years later that Eli’s daughter “told me that, when the building was being erected, the anti-slavery and temperance agitations were beginning, and it was found difficult to procure suitable places for the discussion of these topics.”[14]  A. Bradford Smith wrote “Mr. Robbins saw the need of a public building where lectures, preaching, and other meetings could be held, and where freedom of speech could be allowed.”[15]

            When their daughters were young, Eli and Hannah agreed upon the importance of women’s education. Acting on their beliefs, they sent daughters Abigail, Ellen, and Julia to Adams Female Academy in Derry, New Hampshire to get a good education.[16] Later, Julia Robbins and her niece Ellen Stone became women’s rights activists and the Robbins family donated funds to suffrage groups and welcomed women’s rights speakers such as Lucy Stone to speak in the Stone Building.  The Stone Building stands as a monument to Eli and Hannah Robbins’ steadfast vision of civil liberty and equal rights for all.

            Eli Robbins also played a larger role than building the Stone Building and bringing free speech and new industry and prosperity to East Lexington. New England had for many decades been ruled by a Puritan theocracy which functioned as the state’s official and tax-supported established church and other religions were not tolerated. In the eighteenth-century dissent and new churches emerged. Though evidently a Protestant with beliefs not so different from those of Lexington’s Unitarian First Parish, Eli Robbins stood up for religious pluralism (the creation of breakaway churches, aka freedom of religion, notably for Protestant sects). Robbins was willing to consider new religious ideas opposed to mainstream church orthodoxy.[17] In the 1830s the First Parish in downtown Lexington still received tax funds as part of Massachusetts established state church and so it opposed (break-away) independent churches like the Baptists.

            Eli Robbins and his friends did not want to worship any longer at the First Parish Church.  The lack of an East Village church was a source of great tension between the residents of the East Village and Lexington Center. Eli Robbins was active in the founding of a Christian Association (what later became a Unitarian church, and since 1891 has been called Follen Community Church). Robbins donated land he owned for the building of the church, helped fund the church and introduced his friend Rev. Charles Follen into the community. When the church hired Follen as their first minister Eli Robbins offered Follen and his wife Eliza temporary residence in the Stone Building. Hannah Robbins invited Rev. Follen to preach in their home until the church was completed. Rev. Follen designed an octagon church, preached in the Stone Building and at the Robbins home, but then temporarily took another job tutoring in New York with better pay.

While Charles Follen was away, Eli Robbins also arranged for Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson to serve as Follen Church’s minister of the East Lexington church from 1835 to early 1839. In the past as a Harvard-trained minister Emerson had preached to orthodox churches, but, as he moved toward a more romantic and nature-centered view of where the holy spirit of God resided, in East Lexington he increasingly spoke of Transcendentalism, of the human soul’s expansive ability to grasp spirituality in nature without Biblical or church constraints. Emerson’s time in East Lexington coincided with the founding years of the Transcendentalist Club, when Emerson and Transcendentalism were becoming more controversial. When young Transcendentalist ministers like Rev. Theodore Parker announced that Christianity as a system of faith could have existed even if Jesus Christ had never existed, orthodox ministers were outraged.[18] 

            After Emerson resigned from the East Lexington pulpit, Eli Robbins also welcomed another controversial Transcendentalist, Bronson Alcott who gave a series of 12 Conversations held in the East Village in 1838, some in the Stone Building and some at Eli and Hannah Robbins’ home. Both Emerson and Alcott tended to look down on their less educated East Village audiences, but for years afterward Eli’s daughters Ellen and Julia attended Transcendentalist lectures given by Emerson and traveled to Boston to hear their distant cousin Rev. Theodore Parker give fiery anti-slavery speeches.[19]

            When Rev. Charles Follen was on his way to resume his pulpit in the newly constructed octagon church in East Lexington he and his wife Eliza planned to live in one of the Robbins-owned houses and to help the Robbins family support the East Lexington community.[20] In 1840 when Rev. Follen was traveling back to East Lexington to preside over the opening of his new church, the cotton caught fire on his steamship, and he died, tragically. The church he had designed and which had hired him as their preacher debated whether to host a service of eulogy for him. The congregation was divided, with the women of the Robbins family strongly in favor of the eulogy, but finally the men who had the right to vote in the church decided against honoring Follen, as did most churches in Boston. Anti-slavery advocates were still too controversial.  In the end, only one church in Boston welcomed Rev. Samuel May to speak about Rev. Follen’s courageous life and Hannah and Julia Robbins made the journey to hear Rev. May praise their lost friend. In tumultuous times Eli and the Robbins family legacy combined open-mindedness and curiosity about a broader religious perspective with a commitment to anti-slavery and other reformist views.

            The nationwide Panic of 1837 resulted in financial disaster for Eli Robbins’s business dealings as he was unable to collect debts owed him. He never recovered financially and family members took titles to his properties and responsibility for his remaining assets, including the family home. There were years of financial problems as the family struggled with lawyers, leases, and loans.

            During the crisis of the 1850s the greater Boston anti-slavery community worked to assist self-emancipated Black people find safe homes as well as transportation to Canada. Underground railroad workers such as Mary Merrick Brooks and Abba May Alcott visited the Robbins home, and active local anti-slavery friends like Caroline and Andrew Wellington shared the Robbins family’s outrage at the re-enslavement of people who simply sought freedom.

In his last years of life Eli Robbins persisted in protesting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 which allowed wide latitude to southern slavecatchers to arrest free Blacks and self-emancipated people on the streets of Boston. Eli, however, did not live to meet John Brown or see the start of the Civil War. Eli Robbins died in 1856 but is still remembered for his lasting impact on Lexington’s East Village. Local historian Richard Kollen recalled that Eli Robbins “contributed to the social cohesion of the East Village so critical to its growth as a community.”[21] Though Ralph Waldo Emerson disliked some of Eli Robbins’ fascination with business and with new-fangled utopian ideas, he admitted that Robbins was “A man of genuine public spirit and profuse liberality.”[22]

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[1]Much of the detail for this essay comes from Mary E. Keenan, In Haste, Julia (Lexington, MA: Lexington Historical Society, 2011); see also Mary E. Keenan, Petitions:  A Patriot Legacy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Historical Society, 2023); see also Charles Hudson, History of the Town of Lexington Bicentennary edition, Vol. II, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1913), pp. 577-581.

[2] George O. Smith, “Reminiscences of the Fur Industry,” Proceedings of the Lexington Historical Society Vol. II (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Historical Society, 1900), 175.

[3]Anne Grady, “Historical Analysis and Architectural History,” Menders, Torrey & Spencer, Historic Structure Report: the Stone Building, September 2009: 1-25; George Smith, “Reminiscences of the Fur Industry,” Proceedings of Lexington Historical Society, Vol 2, 1900, 177-178.

[4]Main Street was present-day Massachusetts Avenue. Albert W. Bryant,” Lexington Sixty Years Ago,” Proceedings of Lexington Historical Society, Vol 2, 1900, 36; Material also comes from Julia A. Robbins Diary, Robbins/ Stone Correspondence, Lexington Historical Society, transcriptions generously shared by Mary E. Keenan. George Simonds Diary, transcribed by Anne Grady.

[5] E.R. Hoar quoted in Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2005), p. 25-26.

[6] Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture, p. 27-28, “Many lyceums debated major policy questions concerning the treatment of Native Americans, the emancipation of southern slaves, the role of women in Public life, and the appropriateness of capital punishment. Lyceums also debated issues of personal and social practice, such as the wearing of mourning attire and the benefits to ‘civilized man’ in abstaining from ‘animal food’.” Nevertheless, some white-run lyceums banned political and religious discussions, while lyceums in Black communities invited politics especially.

[7]Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 308.

[8]Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, p. 282-283.

[9]Donald Yacovone, Samuel Joseph May and the dilemmas of the liberal persuasion, 1797-1871(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 57-72; Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023).

[10]Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, p. 251.

[11] Donald Yacovone, Samuel Joseph May and the dilemmas of the liberal persuasion, 1797-1871(Philadelphis, PA: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 64-65.

[12]https://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/john-quincy-adams-and-the-gag-rule.

[13]Andrew Wellington to Samuel May, June 23, 1850, William Lloyd Garrison Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Digital Commonwealth, in the 1840s and early 1850s the Stone Building was called Lothrop Hall after Eli Robbins’ son-in-law Stillman Luther Lothrop. Andrew Wellington was a leader of Lexington abolitionists, and he had tried without success to arrange for speakers to come to Lexington’s Town Hall. He wrote May that “We are to hold the meeting at Lothrop’s Hall East Lexington the same place where we held it before.”

[14]George Smith, “Reminiscences of the Fur Industry,” Proceedings of Lexington Historical Society, Vol 2, 1900, 177-178.

[15]A. Bradford Smith, “History of the Stone Building,” Proceedings of Lexington Historical Society, Vol 2, 1900, 147.

[16]See Mary E., Keenan, In haste, Julia : Julia Robbins Barrett, 1819-1900 : abolitionist, artist, suffragist; Emily A. Murphy, “Abolition, Women’s Rights and War: From the End of the Revolution to the End of the Civil War, 1790-1865,” White Paper #2 for Lexington Historical Society Exhibit “Something Must Be Done: Bold Women of Lexington,” Courtesy of the Lexington Historical Society; also one of the Robbins daughters attended the Ursuline Community school at Mt. Benedict in Charlestown in 1834, see receipt
fragment of correspondence between the Mother Superior and Eli or Hannah Robbins and a receipt for boarding, April 1834, in Charles Follen Papers, Box 1, Massachusetts Historical Society. Anti-Catholic mobs burned down the convent and school later that year, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursuline_Convent_riots

[17] A much more detailed explanation of the rise of religious pluralism in Concord can be found in Robert A. Gross, The transcendentalists and their world (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); in the early nineteenth century religious freedom primarily extended to varieties of Protestants but East Lexington eventually welcomed the first Jewish and the first Catholic places of worship in town, Richard Kollen, Lexington: From Liberty’s Birthplace to Progressive Suburb (Portsmouth, NH: Arcadia Publishing, 2004), the population of Lexington doubled in the four decades before the Civil War, largely because of Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine. Lexington in the 1850s was a hotbed of the Know-Nothing, anti-immigrant party, .pp. 49-50.

[18] Dean Grodzins, American heretic: Theodore Parker and transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

2002).

[19]Keenan, In Haste Julia; also see Julia Robbins 1850 Diary, Lexington Historical Society.

[20]Samuel Cabot to Stephen Robbins, Feb. 10, 1840, Eliza Follen to Mrs. Eli Robbins, Archival date, April 1839, Charles Follen Papers, Box 1, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[21]Kollen, Lexington, p. 53.

[22] As quoted in Anne Grady’s working paper “Charles Follen and the East Village;” William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, Merrell R. Davis, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Harrison Hayford, eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 35.

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By members of the Lexington Lyceum Historical Programming and Research Committee, especially Kathleen Dalton with editing from Mary Keenan and E. Anthony Rotundo