Ellen Garrison: An Upstander for Justice

Ellen Garrison grew up in the Robbins House and was a Freedmen’s School teacher in the South as part of the American Missionary Association1. In 1866, after facing racial discrimination in a Baltimore train station, Ellen was determined to seek justice. She filed a lawsuit against the railroad after she and a fellow schoolteacher were “forcibly ejected” from a waiting room, and the case became a legal test of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. On these events, Ellen wrote several letters to her colleagues. These are some of the things she wrote2:

“This is the first time that I have felt it to be my duty to make any serious complaint but an outrage has just occurred which demands attention.  It was nothing less than the forcible ejection of myself and Miss Anderson from the ladies’ sitting room at the depot of the Philadelphia Baltimore & Washington Railroad in the city of Baltimore…”

“[we] took our seats in the ladies’ room from which we were thrown out –  literally thrown.  We came up in [the] next train with the impression that we had been outrageously abused, and insulted and hurt also, as it was done in a very rough manner.  I feel the effects of it still.”

“We were injured in our persons as well as our feelings for it was with no gentle hand that we were assisted from that room…

I made up my mind to make a complaint to the Superintendent of the Freedman’s Bureau General Stannard whose headquarters are at Baltimore.  I did so, in person.  He said that it ought to be attended to.  The General also told me that he would do all in his power.  He also says he wishes to ascertain whether respectable people have rights which are to be respected.  Thus you see it will be a question of much importance.  It will not benefit us merely as individuals but it will be a stand point for others.

…

It is different from the past.  We can now give evidence.”

And thus, Ellen took legal action to question the strength of the new law.

“[The] people of Baltimore came to our aid in a very unexpected manner.  They said they would assist us with their money to continue the case and by no means to give in but test it and find out if we have civil rights or not.  They said it concerned them all.

…

We did not once lose sight of our position, but maintained our dignity.

…

we contend against outrage and oppression wherever we find it, firmly standing and giving away for the rudest shocks”4

Unfortunately, Ellen’s suit was dismissed. Throughout the Reconstruction Period, southern courts and lawmakers failed to duly uphold the civil protections promised to African Americans by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (and later, the 14th Amendment). Even though the lawsuit didn’t see the success Ellen and the people of Baltimore had hoped for, her dedication to seeking the same protections that activists would fight for in the coming decades is no less significant, and her story is an early landmark in a huge movement that continues today2.

Thank you for educating yourself about Concord’s African-American and anti-slavery history.

Works Cited:

1 Concord Museum. “The Letters of Ellen Garrison.” YouTube, YouTube Video, 1 June 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTCUOj3LEo0. Accessed 25 May 2023.

2 “Ellen Garrison Exhibit – the Robbins House.” The Robbins House, 7 Mar. 2019, robbinshouse.org/projects/ellen-garrison-exhibit/. Accessed 25 May 2023.

3 Forbes, Ella. African American Women during the Civil War. Routledge, 2013.

4 Quotes.docx, Ellen. “Copy of Ellen Quotes.docx.” Google Docs, 2019, docs.google.com/document/d/11s4GQrii-ua8pOGG3o31zQvMQ1_IQecc/edit. Accessed 25 May 2023.

The Life of Ellen Garrison 

For the entirety of her childhood, Ellen Garrison would call the Robbins House in Concord, Massachusetts home. Her mother, Susan Garrison, was one of the first residents of the house, and Ellen Garrison would return to Concord each summer during her adult life. Having been born in 1823, she grew up during the Antebellum Period, a time that saw a leap in the push for abolition. Her mother and father were very active in the town of Concord throughout her early life, taking part in local activities. Susan was a founding member of the Concord Female Antislavery Society, hosting their second meeting in her home. In fact, Ellen’s engagement in the questions of Civil Rights extended beyond those of African-Americans. Her signature appeared alongside 200 others on a petition protesting the government’s treatment of the Cherokee. She attended Concord’s public schools and earned several awards recognizing her academic prowess2. As an adult, Garrison became a Freedmen’s School teacher in the South as part of the American Missionary Association1.

ANTISLAVERY ACTIVIST
“…Early on, she learned about racial discrimination, and followed in her mother’s footsteps as an antislavery activist. At 12, she marched in a Concord parade hand-in-hand with her white schoolmate ‘beneath the gaze of curiosity, surprise, ridicule and admiration.’ Ellen signed many petitions as a way to make her voice heard.

After the Civil War, Ellen taught newly freed people during Reconstruction. Her application explained, ‘I have a great desire to go and labor among the freedmen of the South. I think it is our duty as a people to spend our lives in trying to elevate our own race. Who can feel for us if we do not feel for ourselves?’

TRUE TO HER CALLING

In the hostility of the post-Reconstruction South, Ellen’s teaching post was defunded. She followed Kansas “Exodusters” in 1879 to again teach newly freed people. After a decade in Kansas as a teacher, Homestead farmer’s wife, and stepmother, Ellen moved with her later family to an egalitarian, antislavery community in Pasadena, California, where she is buried with other antislavery activists.”3

Thank you for educating yourself about Concord’s African-American and anti-slavery history.

Works Cited

1 Concord Museum. “The Letters of Ellen Garrison.” YouTube, YouTube Video, 1 June 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTCUOj3LEo0. Accessed 25 May 2023.

2 “Ellen Garrison Exhibit – the Robbins House.” The Robbins House, 7 Mar. 2019, robbinshouse.org/projects/ellen-garrison-exhibit/. Accessed 25 May 2023.

3 “Ellen Garrison – the Robbins House.” The Robbins House, 12 June 2020, robbinshouse.org/story/ellen-garrison-jackson/. Accessed 26 May 2023.

The Robbins House

Pathways to Independence

This 544-square-foot house, built in the early 1820s, was originally located on an isolated farm overlooking the Great Meadows along the Concord River. The first two families who lived here were descendants of Caesar Robbins, a Revolutionary War Patriot. In 1823, Caesar’s son Peter Robbins purchased the new two-room house and over thirteen acres for $260. Peter and his wife Fatima resided in the west side of the house; Peter’s sister, Susan, her husband Jack Garrison, and their children occupied the east side. Peter Hutchinson, Fatima’s relative, bought the house in 1852. He and his large family were the last to live in this house on the farm.

Power of Self-Determination

In 2010, the house was saved from demolition, moved here, and restored. Today, The Robbins House embodies the determination of Caesar Robbins and his family to support themselves on the land and to shape their own destinies as free men and women—and serves to inspire conversations about race and social justice issues1.

Want to engage in Concord’s African-American and antislavery history? Visit The Robbins House today, experience state-of-the-art exhibits, and learn about Concord’s lesser-known early inhabitants from knowledgeable and passionate interpreters. The Robbins House was once home to several generations of Concord’s free African-Americans; today, we are lucky enough to use the space within its walls to learn their stories and better understand our history.

Thank you for educating yourself about Concord’s African-American and anti-slavery history.

Works Cited

1 “Learn the History – the Robbins House.” The Robbins House, 12 Apr. 2021, robbinshouse.org/learn/. Accessed 5 Sept. 2023.

The Cuba Plantation Bell – Plantation Artifact

This Cuba Plantation Bell was made in 1832 in the town of Trinidad, Cuba. Its specific whereabouts for nearly a century are unknown, but in 1926 it was gifted to Belmont Hill School by the General Manager of the Trinidad Sugar Company1.

KIDNAPPED AND EXPLOITED

Historians estimate that roughly 7% of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries were transported to Cuba to work on the island’s many sugar and coffee plantations. That’s about 600 to 900 thousand people2. Cuba attracted an enormous amount of trade in human cargo; despite bans on the slave trade from the United States, Great Britain, and Spain, the island’s illicit trade of humans continued for decades until 1867, when the last documented ship carrying enslaved Africans landed in Cuba3.

DISCOVERING THE BELL’S HISTORY

In 2018, student historians at Belmont Hill School researched school archives as well as academic scholarship on Cuban slavery to determine how the bell had been used. Had this bell called free people to church, or enslaved people to labor? Its intended use can be discerned from the way in which it was mounted at the school. The December 1925 issue of the school paper The Sextant notes that, once it arrived, the bell would be “mounted on scaffolding as is the custom in Cuba.”2 Syracuse University historian Theresa A. Singleton has observed that bells mounted on a “simple frame, were used on plantations everywhere to structure the daily routine of slave workers.” 4

Taken together, these two pieces of evidence persuaded the student scholars and school administrators that this bell had indeed contributed to Cuba’s violent slave labor regime. Following a vote by the school’s Board of Trustees, the bell was removed from campus in late summer 2020.

The Cuba Plantation Bell and The Robbins House symbolize the two poles of this racial wealth gap. The bell represents the systematic theft of wealth – and of life – through forced labor. The house represents the dream of home ownership, of being able to invest one’s earnings in such a way that wealth can be passed along to the next generation.

Thank you for educating yourself about Concord’s African-American and anti-slavery history.

Works Cited

1 Moody’s Manual of Railroads & Corporation Securities,

2 The Sextant Volume III, No. 1 (Belmont Hill School, Christmas 1925),

3 Cuba and the United States in the Atlantic Slave Trade (1789–1820)” Tomich, Dale. “World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: The Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760-1868” Theory & Society, Vol. 20, No. 3 (June 1991), 304.

4 Theresa A. Singleton, “Nineteenth-Century Built Landscape of Plantation Slavery in Comparative Perspective,” Chapter 5 in The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015).

5 The Robbins House, “The Cuba Plantation Bell,” Brochure.

John “Jack” Garrison; Racial Inequality Then and Now

40 Years Enslaved, Forever a Fugitive

By 1810, John “Jack” Garrison had fled his enslaved life in New Jersey for freedom in Concord. Here he found work as a woodcutter and day laborer for Concord residents. In 1812 he married Caesar Robbins’ daughter, Susan, one of the first of The Robbins House’s residents. Under the threat of both the 1793 and 1850 federal fugitive slave laws, Jack was vulnerable to capture for the rest of his life.

New Jersey’s Gradual Emancipation

In February 1804, New Jersey passed a law providing for the “gradual emancipation of slaves” and became the last Northern state to begin the process of ending slavery within its borders. The 1804 act provided that children of enslaved people born after July 4, 1804 would be freed when they reached the age of 21 for women and the age of 25 for men. People held in bondage who had been born before these laws were passed remained enslaved until 1846 when they were considered indentured servants who were “apprenticed for life”. Slavery did not truly end in New Jersey until it was ended nationally in 1865 after the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Signed with an “X”

Slavery denied Jack an education; he signed his name with an “X” throughout his life, but his surviving children went to Concord schools and were “literate and good students.” In his later years, Jack lived on and off at Concord’s poor farm until his son John could afford to remove him. Well into his 60s, Jack walked about town “with his saw-horse over his shoulder and his saw on his arm.” He lived to be about 92 years old1.

Symbol of a Cause

As the oldest person in town, Jack received a walking stick from the Town of Concord, and the Concord Female Antislavery Society printed his image on a calling card used to raise awareness of the antislavery movement. Jack’s and his son John’s photos are the only known images of early Concord African-Americans1; early symbols of the fight for freedom.

Thank you for educating yourself about Concord’s African-American and anti-slavery history.

Works Cited

1 “Jack Garrison – the Robbins House.” The Robbins House, 12 June 2020, robbinshouse.org/story/jack-garrison/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2023.

2 “John Garrison Right to Equal Employment Conclusion” The Robbins House, 2019, Accessed 3 Sept. 2023.

Narrated by Alex Nugent