Inside the Bigelow House
Posted on | February 25, 2010 | No Comments
by Liz Clayton
Editor’s note: The following commentary is part of a series from the Drinking Gourd Project, dedicated to preserving the Caesar Robbins house as an educational center for the untold stories of Concord’s early Africans, abolitionists and other civil liberties advocates.
Dressed in her hoop skirt, scarf and shawl, Rosa Hallowell set out tea cups and saucers, while Susan Ryan put out the Brooks Antislavery Cake she’d baked, preparing for the Nashoba Brooks School CFASS (Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society) meeting.
Waiting for her visitors, Rosa talked about what drew her to the Bigelow House on Sudbury Road, where she lives. “My ancestors Edward and Norwood Hallowell were colonels in the Civil War’s all-black 54th Regiment, and their parents were abolitionists whose summer home was an Underground Railroad station. So when I heard that this house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, it called to me.” Rosa has since portrayed Ann Bigelow for the Drinking Gourd Project four times.
Soon 32 sixth-grade girls, with their teacher Lucy Douglas, stepped through Rosa’s front door and back 160 years, curtsying to Frederick Douglass (played by Guy Peartree) and Henry David Thoreau (Richard Smith) before taking their seats at “Ann Bigelow’s” table.
Ann and her husband, blacksmith Francis Bigelow, were active abolitionists who helped with the famed escape of Shadrach Minkins in February 1851. Minkins was the first fugitive seized in New England under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
“There was a knock on our door at 3 a.m., and when Francis opened it, there stood the vigilante Lewis Hayden with Shadrach Minkins,” Ann recounted. Hayden had just stormed a Boston courtroom, and carried Minkins away into a sea of antislavery protestors. Shadrach was arrested while working as a waiter at the Cornhill Coffeehouse in Boston, because his master in Virginia sent an agent after him four months after the Fugitive Slave Act passed. “We fed Shadrach, and our neighbors Mary and Nathan Brooks gave him clothes and money, raised by selling Brooks Cake. We don’t hide fugitive slaves — we put Shadrach up in our guest room, where we felt he had a right to stay.”
Next Thoreau stood up to ask the girls, “Do you think people should be bought and sold like cattle? How many of you would speak out to end a system like that?” All hands went up. “My mother and sisters are very active in Concord’s Antislavery Societies, and we’ve taken in several fugitive slaves on their way north. Often I drive them to the train station, give them money for their journey, and even travel with them for a stop or two on the train.”
Then Frederick Douglass took the floor, singing in his deep voice: “When the sun comes back, and the first quail calls, Follow the drinking gourd…. The drinking gourd is another name for the big dipper — pointing us to the North star so we can follow it to freedom.” He talked about growing up with his Grandmother Bailey — never realizing he was enslaved until the age of 6, when she walked him up to the main house, introduced him to scads of half brothers and sisters, and left him there without a good bye. “I learned fast what it meant to be somebody’s property then,” he said. “Later I ran away to Massachusetts and read William Garrison’s paper The Liberator, then became an abolitionist myself so that I could tell people what it’s like to be enslaved. I came here to Concord several times to speak out against slavery, and visited often with the Thoreaus.”
After sipping tea, tasting Brooks Cake, and reading about the female abolitionist described on their name tags, the girls left with a connection to Concord history they hadn’t made before, through some of Concord’s untold but equally revolutionary stories.
To learn more, read “To Set this World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord” by Sandra Petrulionis. The Drinking Gourd Project, along with many town historic organizations, is working to restore the Robbins house for use as a civil liberties educational center. You can help by coming to April Town Meeting and voting yes on Article 35 for CPC funding approval and Article 36 to lease land next to the North Bridge parking lot as the new location for the Robbins House Educational Center. For further information, please see the Drinking Gourd Project’s Web site.