Built about 1823, the Robbins House was home to the first free generations of the Robbins family and their relatives, whose lives connected Concord to wider local, state, and national struggles over slavery, antislavery, civil rights, and independence. Caesar Robbins, enslaved from birth in nearby Chelmsford, served in the American Revolution in 1776. His daughter Susan Robbins married Jack Garrison, who had fled slavery in New Jersey and moved to Concord as a free man between 1810 and 1812; they later lived in the house. In 1823, Peter Robbins, Caesar’s son, bought the house and 13 acres for $260, living on one side with his wife while his sister and her family lived on the other, and Ellen Garrison was born there. Susan Robbins Garrison became a charter member of the Concord Female Antislavery Society in 1837, and from 1838 to 1861 residents of the house signed petitions supporting antislavery efforts, desegregation, and Cherokee land rights. In 1841, John Garrison, Susan and Jack’s son, was listed as an eligible voter. In 1852, relative Peter Hutchinson bought the house and lived there with his extended family. In 1866, Ellen Garrison attempted to enforce the first Civil Rights Act in court after a railroad agent forcibly ejected her from a Baltimore train station. In 1868, Peter Hutchinson left the house, a wealthy landowner moved it to Bedford Street, and it was sold to Irish immigrants; in 2011 it was restored and relocated. The family’s story unfolded alongside milestones that included slavery in Concord by 1725, John Jack’s 1773 epitaph criticizing the hypocrisy of liberty without freedom for all, Massachusetts’s legalization of slavery in 1641 and its 1783 constitutional declaration that all men are born free and equal, the rise of organized abolition in the 1830s and 1840s, Harriet Tubman’s Concord appearances in 1859, the Atlantic slave trade, the American Revolution, the Underground Railroad in Concord, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, followed by the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2012.