 Wonderful to see you, it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Lindsey Farner, the Executive Director of the Roquefee Museum in Ferrisburg, Vermont. The Roquefee is one of Vermont's designated national landmarks. Its collections include thousands of letters, newspapers, books, and pamphlets related to Roquefee's longtime owners, the Robinson family, and the family's role in the anti-slavery movement. Dr. Farner earned her degrees at the Durham University in the United Kingdom, both her master's and her doctorate in history. She specialized in early modern British history and focused on Quakerism and the 17th century reformation. Dr. Farner began working in public history in 2010 and has worked at heritage sites and historical societies. She was hired as the Executive Director of Roquefee in September of 2020. We're excited to bring you Dr. Farner. Please help me welcome her. Thank you so much. I have some pretty dark slides, so having the lights off I think will be very helpful. So thank you everyone for coming out this afternoon to hear me talk a little bit about Roquefee. Out of curiosity, how many people have been to Roquefee before? Oh, quite a number. Thank you for visiting the museum and supporting us. For those who might be new to the museum, I thought I'd give you a little bit of background about the site and what we are and what we really do at the institution. So we are a national historic landmark. We are designated by the National Park Service as a significant underground railroad history site. We are deemed one of the best documented underground railroad history sites in the nation. We have 90 acres on the site. Those 90 acres were once part of the original farmland of the Robinsons, and they had over – oh, we lost the mic. Can we lose it? Yes. Wait, maybe it's back? Yeah. It's going back and forth. So I can also talk very loud if we need to. So the original site was hundreds of acres, eight to nine hundred acres, we believe possibly a thousand. Today, are we still losing it? It's kind of nice and close to you. All right. I think it's still off. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's get that. Why don't we wait and see if we can get it to work. Is it back now? Yeah. All right. So let's see if we can keep it on. So today we are 90 acres. We were once part of the original farmland of the Robinsons, which was about 800 to 1,000. We're not entirely sure how much land they owned. It was a lot, but we're not sure how much it was. Talk into the mic. I think it's going off. Yeah. It's on and off, unfortunately. So we have nine historic outbuildings at the site. You can see if you can get it to work. To keep my magic touch on it, it's, I mean, it should be fine. If it keeps doing it, I can replace the batteries. Okay. All right. We'll see how it goes. It's off again as soon as you walked away. We're going to have to stay here all day. Why don't we wait for him to come back with some batteries? That sound like a plan or I could keep going if you want me to speak very loudly. Just keep going. Okay. So we are 90 acres at one point the Robinsons had over 800 acres. We're not entirely sure. They were land speculating quite a bit. So we're not sure how many acres they owned entirely, but we have 90 of part of the original farm. On those 90 acres, we have nine historic buildings, including the historic home. We have a lot of farm outbuildings dating from various ages, some from the 18th century going all the way up to the mid 19th century. And we also have a modern education center that was built in 2013. I think that's going to work. Thank you. On those 90 acres, we also have a series of trails, which are open year round. Those trails have an interpretive portion, which talk about how the landscape of the farm has changed quite significantly over time. In particular, how the farm has gone from a working farm and an orchard to the new growth forest that you see on the site today. So we have a lot of school programs that come out both for the underground railroad history, but we also have some schools come out to do some environmental work on the site as well. So we have four generations of the family that we interpret and talk about at Rokeby. From 1793 until 1961, there was a Robinson living on this site. The museum is dedicated to telling the human experience of the underground railroad as well as the lives of the four generations who lived at the site. So we have a lot of stories and a lot of history that we can cover. Our most significant history being our anti-slavery and underground railroad history. But each generation of the family contributes in some way to the American story. They were farmers, they were artists, they were writers, as well as abolitionists. And our museum collection really reflects the diversity of activities of the family. We hold over 15,000 letters across the four generations. Those are on permanent loan to Middlebury College so that they can be accessed for research. We also have art, particularly from the last two generations of the family, a significant book collection, farming equipment and tools. We have pretty much every type of household good you could name somewhere in a corner of part of the property. There's a lot of material culture that can help us tell various stories. In 1961, when the museum was founded, the site really focused on the son of our abolitionists, Ralland Evans Robinson. We are also a national register property. When the national register was completed for the site, the focus was mainly on Ralland Evans Robinson. The underground railroad was a portion of the story of that application. Ralland's work as a prominent author, as an artist, was really the focus of the interpretation and the stories that we told at Rokeby. Ralland Evans is best known for his Danvis Tales, his fictional Vermont town. Those books are still studied today because they are written in the Vermont dialect and so linguists study to learn more about the Vermont dialect through his writings. He was also an early conservationist. He was a naturalist. He was interested in Abenaki history and tried to create an Abenaki dictionary. He was interested in Abenaki culture. He was very well known and we really credit Ralland Evans for our existence as an institution. He is the reason why the museum was started. We were even called the Ralland Evans Robinson Memorial Association at our initial founding. Rokeby didn't come until 1997. We always saw the underground railroad as a piece of the story at the institution, but it was always secondary to Ralland's story. It wasn't really until the 1980s when volunteers started to dig into the artifacts in the collection, the letters, the books and the newspapers and the pamphlets that they began to piece together just how significant this underground railroad story really was. By the 1990s, there was a whole new interpretation starting to take place of the site that focused on the underground railroad and that second generation and their anti-slavery activities. This coincided with a national movement to better understand the history of the underground railroad and Rokeby being identified by the National Park Service as a place that should be designated as a landmark. Within our family generations, we are in the process right now of redoing our exhibit space at the museum. Our education center that opened in 2013 houses all of our exhibit space. We have a rotating exhibit space to tell multiple stories of the family and we have a main exhibit that focuses solely on the underground railroad. Last year, that exhibit turned 10 years old and we knew it was time to do an update of that exhibit. We've decided that we really want to tell the full story of the Robinson family as well as focus on the known freedom seekers that came through the site on the underground railroad. To really understand our abolitionist generation, we had to go back to really when the Robinsons first arrived in the colonies in the 17th century. We really focus on the complexity of the Robinsons as a family. They took radical action during that abolitionist period but we recognized at the institution that they were by no means perfect and we would do a disservice if we were placing them on a pedestal. If we look at the first generation at Rokeby and that is Thomas and Jemima Robinson and this is Thomas, we don't have a picture of Jemima unfortunately. They are the first Robinsons to live at Rokeby. They moved from Rhode Island in 1791. Likely for the opportunities that Vermont offered, Thomas and his brother William came together. They seemed to have been land speculating. They were second sons from a second marriage. There wasn't much for them in Newport, Rhode Island, so they were looking for opportunities to settle and make their own lives. Thomas owned mills, he owned several farms and properties across the Champlain Valley and the family purchases Rokeby from the Dakin family in 1793 and settled there soon after. The big question that we started to ask ourselves when we were redoing the new underground railroad exhibit was where did the money come from for the family? Thomas arrives in Vermont with money. He's not coming here and trying to find a job and to save up money. He has funds in hand to start purchasing properties. And that was a big question. Where did the family's wealth come from in the 18th century? So that led us to go back to the Robinsons in Newport, Rhode Island. And I apologize in advance. It is incredibly confusing. They named all of the family members either Ralland or Thomas. Sometimes it's Ralland Thomas Robinson, so I apologize. I'll try and be as clear as I can with all of these family members. But if we go back to our first Ralland, the first Robinson to arrive in the colonies in the 1670s, we find that the family were enslavers and they had engaged in the slave trade in some form through the 18th century. Ralland Robinson, our first Robinson, we know that he was an enslaver because he left enough property that he did have a probate record at his death. And I find this probate record rather disturbing because his nine enslaved people are listed amongst the livestock within his holdings. So you'll see there's the mares, the colts, the horses, the swine and nine negroes that were passed down to his son, William. And I think, oh, Mike's back. So we know that when Ralland dies, all of his property goes to his son, William Robinson, who becomes for a period of time the deputy governor of the colony of Rhode Island. Ralland's enslaved people are inherited by William and then William passes down his wealth to his numerous sons, including Thomas, who is the grandfather of our abolitionists. Thomas Robinson, the father of our first Thomas at Rokeby and the grandfather of our abolitionists, was directly involved in the slave trade. We don't believe that he was an enslaver himself in Newport where he was a merchant. But we do know through ship manifests that he was at least partially an owner of a number of ships that carried slaves from Barbados to Newport. He was directly involved in selling and the transporting of goods to plantations in Barbados. And he did this throughout the 18th century. However, at some point, Thomas undergoes a kind of reformation and begins supporting the early anti-slavery movement in the 1780s. It's not entirely clear why this happens. Some of it might have been for religious purposes. The family that was established in Newport, Rhode Island, were Quakers. They remained Quakers until the abolitionist generation when Ralland and his wife Rachel leave Quakerism over the question of immediate abolition. But we know that Quakerism in the 1780s makes it a general rule that members of the society of friends must manumit their slaves or they would be disowned. They would be kicked out of the religion. So it's possible that Thomas' turn towards anti-slavery activities was for religious purposes and a shift in Quaker culture in the 18th century. Or it could have been financial as well. After the French and Indian War, the Seven Years War, we find that Thomas had lost a lot of money. One of his ships was captured by the French at one point, so it's very possible that some of it was financial. He was no longer participating in activities that supported the slave economy, and so he turned to anti-slavery activities. We're not really sure. What we do have, though, is this record from 1788 that Thomas penned disclosing the enslavement of free blacks in Newport, Rhode Island. This letter details the names of individuals taken into slavery and who the individual was that kidnapped and enslaved free blacks in Newport. It's considered an early anti-slavery document. It was intended for circulation and to be published and also to be used as a legal document to prosecute the individuals who were enslaving free blacks. One theory with this document is that Robinson had turned into an anti-slavery advocate, possibly from pressures from his cousins and his in-laws, who were actively engaging in lawsuits against enslavers in Rhode Island. But we're not entirely sure. Just a portion of this document exists in the Pennsylvania Historical Society. What we do know, however, is that the wealth that the family gained in Newport by participating in slavery and the slave trade trickles down to the Robinson families here in Vermont. While the Robinsons may not have participated directly in slavery, the family's wealth, the money that Thomas had to buy Rookby, to buy land and establish himself in Vermont, trickled down through their involvement in slavery. And it created a level of privilege and opportunity for the family to then become involved in the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century. What the money also allowed the family to do was purchase Merino sheep in 1810. So the family purchases Rookby and move into the site in the 1790s. And by 1810, Thomas Robinson becomes one of the first farmers in Vermont to import Merino sheep. So again, he already has money in hand. He's spending the equivalent of $10,000 just for a single ram. So he has the money and the fortune to be taking part in this. In 1814... Oh, that got cut off a little bit. So in 1814, that's a very distorted view of Rookby. I'm not sure what's happening. But in 1814, the family puts an addition on to the home. They were living in kind of a small farmhouse that's at the back of the property now. But if you see the tallest roofline, not the triangular roofline, but the taller roofline, that's an addition that the family puts on with the wealth that they gained with the Merino sheep. So what we find is that by the 1815, about the time that Thomas' eldest son, Rowland, is getting ready to head off to school, the family is wealthy. You could consider them kind of gentlemen farmers in many ways. They're working on the business side of the farming. And Rowland is heading off to school, and he has the money, and he has the privilege to be able to pursue his abolitionist activities. So our second generation, this is Rowland Thomas Robinson and his wife, Rachel. When Rowland heads off to school in the 18 teens, he goes to Nine Partners School in New York, which is a Quaker school. While he is at Nine Partners, he meets his future wife, Rachel Robinson, and they marry in New York in 1820, where she was from. The two of them become ardent anti-slavery advocates. They would have considered themselves abolitionists, and abolitionists in the 19th century were deemed radical when it came especially to understandings of emancipation. Rowland and Rachel believed in immediate emancipation. When many of their fellow Quakers and other anti-slavery advocates were pushing for more gradual emancipation, the idea of preparing the economy, preparing the society for and end to slavery, they believed that slavery had to end immediately, and there was no excuse for not ending slavery. So they really, they left. When they married in 1820, they come back to Rokeby, and at this point Thomas is still pretty young, he's still running the farm, so Rowland can now pursue his interest in the anti-slavery movement. So from the 1820s onwards, we see both Rowland and Rachel actively engaged in anti-slavery activities, not just in Vermont, but by the 1830s they are traveling all across the country. They're in New York and Rochester, they're going to Philadelphia, Rowland's in Boston, they're meeting and making connections with other abolitionists, and he has the funding in order to support himself to do this. He doesn't have to necessarily work to make money to go off and do these activities. The family has their own wealth. Rowland and Rachel become heavily involved in Vermont's anti-slavery activities. He is the founder of the Ferrisburg Anti-Slavery Society, one of the founders of the Vermont Anti-Slavery Society, which is the first statewide anti-slavery society in the country, and he even helped to bring Frederick Douglass to Ferrisburg during the Hunter Conventions tour. Along with Rowland and Rachel, their good friend Ann King is also working as an anti-slavery advocate during this period. Rowland and Rachel meet Ann at Nine Partners. At the time she is a teacher there. Sometime in the 1820s she becomes ill and she is invited to rope me to convalesce and she just pretty much never leaves. She just stays with the family, becomes a very close friend. She and the Robinsons called each other brother and sister. She called Rowland and Rachel her adopted brother and sister. They were so close that they're even buried together. Rowland in the middle, Rachel on one side and Ann on the other. Ann is arguably just as important to Vermont's anti-slavery movement as the Robinsons. Living with them and being unmarried her entire life, she had the ability to travel. She often traveled with Rowland to anti-slavery conventions. She would go in here speakers. She traveled to New York and Pennsylvania where her family lived and also operated a known underground railroad sites in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York. She helped to educate the children in the home, the third generation of the family and a lot of our artifacts in our collection actually come from Ann. She was constantly in search of knowledge. Books, newspapers, pamphlets, a lot of the items at the museum have her name inside of them and she passed all of those down to the family and they have remained in the collection. So the Robinsons and Ann King were part of a much larger movement in the United States. In the 1830s, anti-slavery societies began to form widely. Abolitionists formed these groups to promote the ideology of abolition and to push back against a pro-slavery agenda that was growing in American society. In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society formed in Philadelphia at the National Anti-Slavery Convention. The organization sought the unconditional abolition of slavery and their declaration of sediments of the American Anti-Slavery Society stated that, quote, every man has a right to his body products of his own labor, to the protection of the law and to the common advantages of society. So the American Anti-Slavery Society sponsored speaking tours, they published newspapers, pamphlets, books, and all of these were distributed amongst abolitionist circles. Supporters were encouraged to organize statewide and local anti-slavery organizations and to support the abolition message within their communities. So with this encouragement from the American Anti-Slavery Society which Rowan Thomas was a member of and for a period of time was part of the executive committee for the American Anti-Slavery Society, he came back to Vermont and helped to push the Vermont Anti-Slavery Society as well as helping to set up local anti-slavery societies particularly in Ferrisburg where he was a member. So within Vermont, one of the questions we frequently get at the museum is what is the history of slavery in Vermont? And for a long time, there were maps that were in textbooks and they were used for teaching the history of enslavement in the U.S. that basically showed that Vermont had no slavery in the States which I always say to people, in 1777, Vermont's constitution had a gradual emancipation clause in it. If the state had no enslavement, there wouldn't have been a need for gradual emancipation. It just wasn't well documented. And I think we know now it is becoming less of a mythology that Vermont did not have slavery. We know that now. But in many places in the U.S., including Vermont, these gradual emancipation laws were very vague. They were intentionally had these gray areas so that you could always circumvent the law. So in the U.S., this idea of gradual abolition was pushed really from the 18th century onwards. This idea of gradually ending enslavement. By the 1830s, though, Vermont abolitionists and abolition societies, they all varied in their beliefs as to whether or not immediate or gradual emancipation was right. But individuals like Rowland and Rachel believed in immediate abolition. And we find that these anti-slavery societies start to fracture by the 1840s because of these differing beliefs and also politics and how immediate or gradual emancipation should happen. One of the biggest contributors of these anti-slavery societies is the circulation of books. The Vermont Anti-Slavery Society issued a recommendation to local anti-slavery societies to start their own anti-slavery libraries. In 1843, the Ferrisburg Anti-Slavery Society also participated in the Hundred Conventions Tours. They were encouraging speakers to come in and to talk about anti-slavery activities. They were trying to convince essentially create a grassroots movement around anti-slavery activities. And even in 1843, though, we find that the communities were not terribly receptive to the anti-slavery message, even in places like Vermont. And one of the best kind of backgrounds of how the reception was is in Frederick Douglass' autobiography. And looking back on his first trip to Vermont during the Hundred Conventions Tours, he started his speaking trip in Middlebury and then went to Ferrisburg. And he writes about this trip, and he states, those who only know the state of Vermont as it is today can hardly understand and must wonder that there were 40 years ago a need for anti-slavery efforts within its border. The several towns we visited showed that Vermont was surprisingly under the influence of the slave power. Her proud boast that within her borders, no slave has ever been delivered up to his master did not hinder her hatred to anti-slavery. In Middlebury, for example, the opposition to our anti-slavery convention was intensely bitter and violent. For people attending our meeting and apparently little was accomplished. In Ferrisburg, the case was different and they're favorable. The way had been paved for us by such stalwart anti-slavery workers as Orson S. Murray, Trial C. Burley, Rowland T. Robinson, and others. So this idea that Douglass notes of paving the way of anti-slavery ideology, one of the ways that this was done was through the library. And we are very lucky at Rookby that the library was saved by the family. We're currently going through a project of all of the books inside the historic house and we're separating them out into collections. And one of the collections is the anti-slavery library. And we know it's the anti-slavery library because they stamped anti-slavery library in it, which is wonderful. But they also, along with these books, we also have an incredible collection of liberator newspapers. For a while, Rowland was the distributor for the Vermont for the liberator newspapers. So we have almost a complete collection of those papers. We also have pamphlets, letters, all pertaining to spreading the message through these libraries. So we're still going through, I cannot tell you how many items we actually have in the collection because it's an ongoing process. But it's incredible to think that these were being shared out and then sent back to Rookby and then the family saved these for later generations. So along with all of this anti-slavery activity, the libraries, the speaking tours, the conventions, the Robinsons were also utilizing the site as a stop on the Underground Railroad. There are many myths and legends surrounding the history of the Underground Railroad. The term Underground Railroad itself, the National Park Service, defines it as the act of self-emancipation by enslaved African-Americans and the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight through the end of the Civil War. There were no set routes for the Underground Railroad. Wherever slavery existed, there were efforts to escape. There were multiple modes of transportation, one of the myths we hear a lot from people is that the Underground Railroad was only on foot and went north, which is not true. People would take boats and ferries and wagons and trains. Any mode of transportation could have been part of a freedom-seeker seeking emancipation. They also traveled quite widely, and you would see individuals going not just north, but they would go south. There's been a lot of research regionally done into freedom-seekers going into Mexico. They would go west. In some instances, freedom-seekers would stay in the communities that they were slaved and live in communities known as maroon communities, where they were in relative safety living amongst free and self-emancipated blacks in the regions in which they had been enslaved. What we do know about a lot of these freedom-seekers is that their journey was dangerous. It was deadly, and it took courage to embark on the road to freedom. Some of the myths that we have encountered through our education programs and our interpretation at Rokeby have come about often because of the lack of documentation around the Underground Railroad. There are many reasons why documentation doesn't exist, not just at our site, but at all sites across the country. And there are also many reasons why sites will call themselves Underground Railroad sites, but don't have the documentation to prove it. One is the danger of both taking the Underground Railroad and participating in the Underground Railroad. It was a federal crime to assist freedom-seekers, particularly after 1850, and there were incentives for slave catchers to catch slaves and also find individuals helping to aid freedom-seekers on the Underground Railroad. And it was dangerous, and it could also be costly for those helping. Because of this, there's a level of secrecy to protect freedom-seekers, so there's very few written records. Often those records are destroyed, so there's just nothing to trace the story. We also know that a lot of enslaved people during this period were illiterate, so their stories are not written down. They have not been read, and so there are a lot of stories in the history that we will never know. We also know that many freedom-seekers changed their names, whether it was to ensure that they were not captured and sent back to enslavement or as an act of self-determination to take their own name, and it makes it even harder to trace individuals in the records for that reason. So we know that there's this uneven historical record that makes it very difficult to trace these stories. So at Rokeby, the number of freedom-seekers who have come through has always kind of gone back and forth. As part of the new exhibition, we sat down and looked at the potential freedom-seekers that have come to Rokeby, and we've started to look at confirmed and unconfirmed actually setting foot on the site. Our two most well-known freedom-seekers to come to the site are Simon and Jesse. They are the individuals who really set us apart from a lot of underground railroad sites in the country. But we do know that there are other individuals who came through, and they are often just barely mentions in one of the letters that we have. For instance, we have two unnamed men or an unnamed man, and all that is simply a mention in the letter. For instance, Rachel Robinson was writing to Ann King and she says, two men had fled bondage in a whale boat and were pursued by American vessels of war. The men were anxious to get to Canada, and the grief sat heavy on our hearts having left their wives behind. They stayed, we believe, just for one night and then traveled on to Canada. That is all we know about those two individuals. We will never be able to trace them in the records. Simon and Jesse, we have no last names for them. Simon were not even sure if he made it to Rokeby, so we'll probably never be able to trace them in the records. These two individuals, Simon and Jesse, we don't know if they met, but they were supposedly at Rokeby around the same time, 1837. Simon had been enslaved in Maryland, and what we know about him comes from letters between Rowland and Oliver Johnson, who was born in Vermont, but was working with William Lloyd Garrison in the American Anti-Slavery Society and was traveling around, and he happened to be in western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh at William C. Griffith's house, and he encountered Simon, who had a $200 reward for his capture. Johnson writes to Rowland, and he tells them all about Simon, including how he would be a good worker for the farm and that he has all of these skills that would be of benefit to Rowland and to the farm. Rowland writes back that he would employ him at Rokeby, and Johnson writes in the last letter that we have that he has given instructions for Simon to get to friends in Philadelphia who would then help him on to Vermont. Whether he actually shows up at Rokeby, we don't know. The name Simon is in quotation marks in the letter, so my guess is that wasn't really his name, so if he shows up in our ledgers, it's under a different name. No idea if he actually made it. Jesse's story is quite different. Jesse had been enslaved in North Carolina. We don't know when he left, and we don't know when he arrived at Rokeby. But Jesse, we believe, asked Rowland to write on his behalf to his enslaver, Ephraim Elliott in North Carolina, to seek his papers of emancipation. Jesse had saved $150 and had offered $150 to have his papers to buy his freedom. So Rowland writes to Ephraim, says that Jesse is there, he has saved up $150 and he's looking to purchase his freedom. Ephraim responds that he will not take less than $300, and that Jesse is too far outside of his kind of area for him to come and capture him, so he's not going to, but he's at least worth $300 and he won't take any less. Rowland writes back and says that's not possible, and we really don't know what happens to Jesse. It is very possible he wanted to have his papers so that he could go back to North Carolina. If he had a family there, he could live as a free man close to his family, and without those papers, he couldn't go back. But we don't know what happens. We're not entirely sure, and we don't know if he even stays at Rowkeby. But we know that he didn't get the additional $150, at least we don't believe he did while he was at Rowkeby. So these stories really, one of the things that's most striking about them and that we're talking more about at Rowkeby is that we talk about these freedom seekers, but we have nothing in their voice. We don't have letters, we don't have artifacts. We only know about them through the words of these white abolitionists. And that loss of voice of the freedom seekers' voices is something we're working to acknowledge as part of our interpretation. So a major part of the Robinson's anti-slavery story is their involvement in spiritualism. The Robinson family for generations had been Quakers. The first Robinson, Rowland, converted to Quakerism very early on in the creation of the religious movement. In many ways, Quakerism was culturally part of who the Robinsons were. They disagreed with the way Quakerism was going about the abolitionist movement and in particular immediate emancipation. So by the 1840s, the Robinsons leave Quakerism and they leave Quakerism at a time in American history when a lot of people are searching for religious meaning and understanding and this becomes the start of the second grade awakening. Spiritualism really takes off in the early 1850s and it is being led by a number of former Quakers who had left the religion. And there are a lot of overlaps between language and how people discuss Quakerism and their connection with God and spiritualism and the connections with the spirits. And so it's this kind of natural progression into spiritualism. But what's really interesting with the 1850s spiritualism movement that's connections to abolition is that the abolitionist movement was using spiritualism to push their ideology. You would see spiritualist communications printed in newspapers like the Liberator and they would often be predicting the Civil War. They could be talking about, they could be having communications with people who had been enslaved or with enslavers who are from beyond the grave talking about how they wish they hadn't been enslavers and the reasons why. They were in some ways being used as a political propaganda for the period. And Anne King, we believe, was the one really pushing spiritualism at rugby. We know that they held seances in the house. They attended seances in Ferrisburg and in Virginia. They were inviting mediums to come to the area to hold these seances. And some of it was for this abolitionist side and some of it was also because at this time Rowland had experienced a number of very close deaths. His father and his eldest son had died. So he was communicating with them most frequently and Anne kept records of those communications which are held in our collections. But one of the most interesting things that Anne did was she kept a scrapbook of communications and newspapers all across the country. And I pulled one of them for you that was published in the Liberator in 1857 which predicts the coming of the Civil War and it was a gentleman who had died on a ship and through this communication he predicted that the Civil War was going to happen and that it was going to be a bloody conflict and that it was an inevitable conflict and it was the only way that slavery was going to end in the U.S. So via this 1850s, 1860s we really don't know a lot about what our abolitionist generation felt about the war, about the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th and 15th Amendments once they're passed. There's very little communication in the letters. They're older in age at this point. They're not as actively engaged in the wider anti-slavery movement. We have no records of a freedom seeker coming through in the 1850s. So for the most part we believe that the family stepped away from being at the forefront of the abolitionist movement. There are a number of reasons for that. One was the farm was financially in trouble, particularly after the collapse of the Marino sheep industry. They had to change and diversify the farm in order to keep it going and that took up a lot of Raelyn's time. He no longer had the money and the privilege to travel. He needed to be home. We also know that they were just getting older. Rachel was sick quite a lot in the 1840s. She was going off to see different specialists. So we really don't have a lot of information of how they felt about the war. Beyond a few mentions that they believed it was becoming inevitable at this point. So a lot of these questions then led to this mythology that grew out of the institution. Raelyn Devins Robinson, the son of our abolitionists, he becomes this very well-known author. And one of the things that becomes kind of truth in many ways for early interpretation at the institution was his book Out of Bondage. In the late 19th century, the American people really wanted to have a romanticized view of the antebellum period, of the underground railroads of the Civil War. And you start to see a whole section of literature that looks at this romanticized idea of a slave running away, traveling the underground railroads, staying at these different sites. And because Raelyn is the son of known abolitionists, his book Out of Bondage is taken as a mixture of fact and fiction. What he remembered as a child, a little bit of his parents' stories mixed in with it. And for the most part, the museum interpreted parts of this book as true. So much so that Raelyn did a sketch that ended up in the book of what we call the Upper Kitchen Chamber. So it's the 18th century second story of the house. And he labeled that the slave room. And for years we called that the slave room. One of my volunteers was giving a tour last summer, and she said that she had somebody on the tour with her who said, oh, we were here in the early 90s. And I remember somebody lifting up a hatch and saying, that's where the slaves hid. We know that's all a lie now. We called it the slave room because Raelyn used it in his book as the place for where the slaves were hidden. It's more likely if Raelyn does remember a freedom seeker staying in the house that they were just sleeping in those rooms and not being hidden in those rooms. The family had a nice new addition. They lived in the nice new addition. Guests would have stayed in this portion of the house, the older bedrooms in the house. So this mythology really grew for decades. And then in the 1990s, when we started to review all of these documents of the Underground Railroad, we realized that out of bondage really was fiction. And we needed to continue to do more research to better understand the Underground Railroad story at the site. So a lot of the research for this presentation, it's a mixture of research that's been done over the decades and some new research that is going to be a part of our exhibit that'll open in May of 2024. We know now that there are a lot of, there were a number of freedom seekers that came through rugby. We will never know how many, just like we will probably never know the total number of freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad nationwide. The secretiveness of the Underground Railroad network and the unlawfulness of seeking self-emancipation limits the records that have survived. We also know that freedom seekers, they change their names, sometimes out of fears, sometimes out of self-determination, and it makes tracing these stories even more complicated. Rokeby's records provide greater understanding of these anti-slavery networks in the United States, and the documents contain information on the abolitionist activities, including meetings, lectures, other locations where freedom seekers might have stayed in the Champlain Valley. All of these really help us understand the much bigger picture of the Underground Railroad. Narratives of freedom seekers at Rokeby come from the lens of our abolitionists, and we are working very hard to make sure that we have that self-awareness as we are doing this research and updating this exhibit. These stories have been passed down through the generations. There are only a handful of documents and objects that directly relate to the freedom seekers who came to the site and are now held within the museum's collections. This lack of documentation is typical for most non-white American history, but it is particularly noticeable for Underground Railroad history. Today, museums across the United States have acknowledged these historical gaps, and it's also due to not just the secretiveness of some of these histories, but it is directly related to prejudice and archiving in what was determined to be important enough to save and what wasn't worth saving in many of our archives at museums. We are, as museums as a whole across the country are grappling with these decisions to not save diverse histories and stories, and it is impacting how we can tell many of both local and national stories related to black history. We find that this inequity also exists in the history at Rokeby. Here, the Underground Railroad was once sensationalized, it was romanticized, and in recent decades, the true history of the Robinson family and the freedom seekers have really been at the forefront of the museum's work, and our ongoing research ensures that we tell the whole story of the past. And I'll say quickly that when this exhibit opens, we have intentionally set it up so that it's not another decade until the exhibit is updated, knowing that we are constantly learning more and uncovering different aspects of the history of the anti-slavery movement in the Underground Railroad. So the hope is that we can update the exhibit as we learn more, knowing that it's not meant to be, I'm really trying to move away. For years, we've called it the permanent exhibit. It is by no means permanent. It's our main exhibit, but it is going to be constantly updated because we are just ongoingly doing research and learning more. So thank you so much. So I'm happy to take questions. How did Rokeby get its name? Yeah, so that's also a little mythology. We're not entirely sure when they started calling it Rokeby, but the family did call it Rokeby. So Rokeby comes from Sir Walter Scott's poem, Rokeby, and there is a Rokeby. It's in County Durham, right on the North Yorkshire border. And Scott wrote a poem based on this kind of architectural beautiful place. It's a mansion, for the most part. It was initially built by somebody with the surname Robinson. No connection to our Robinson. So the mythology that we kind of tell is that Rowland Evans Robinson thought it was funny to call our little farmhouse Rokeby, and the family just kept doing that. There were many names for the farmhouse. Locust Grove was one. The Robinson Farmstead was one. But Rokeby really stuck from the late 19th century onwards. So when they decided to rename the institution from the Rowland Evans Robinson Memorial Association, they decided to go back to what the last generation called the site, and that was Rokeby. I seem to remember from 1966 when my wife and I, along with good friends, stayed at Rowland Evans. And it seems that the slave room, the door on the right of the picture, had a small room beyond it, which was labeled the slave portion. That's not correct according to your... According to the research that was done in the late 80s and then for the National Landmark status that that was not correct. Yeah, there were... The Memorial Association did document when many of those walls came down and they made just the two big open rooms, because I think the family had put a wall in also to separate out for the bed and breakfast that they were running. And I think one of the things I speculated was it was a linen closet that became the slave room, but yeah, that it wasn't actually a slave room. If memory serves you correctly, I think there was supposed to have been an article of furniture that walked up that door and the assets. So bookcases. Bookcases, yeah, yeah. You mentioned early on that one of the... I think the earliest Robinson... something was written in Vermont dialect. Oh yeah, so Rowland Evans Robinson. I'm not a Vermonter, so don't ask me to do the Vermont dialect. It's a regional dialect is my understanding. So when I first started at Rokeby, I was reading through a lot of Rowland Evans' work because we have a lot of his books in the collection and one of the other staff members said, don't try and read his Danvis tales. Listen to them because you will not finish the book if you try and read it because it is in Vermont dialect. So, but listening to it, you can hear the dialect a lot more, but it was a regional dialect. Well, is it available as a spoken thing? Has anybody actually said it and can you get it online or anything like that? Yeah, I don't know if the Vermont Folklife Center has any videos with the Vermont dialect. Yeah, the audio of it. I'm not sure if they do or not that's available online. Yeah. Yeah, I can't remember if they do, but your best bet is probably to check with the Vermont Folklife Center to see if they have anything recorded. And also I was interested to hear that apparently they left the Quakers because the Quakers were not radical enough. And they even left the radical branch of Quakers. They split with the Hick site movement, so they still weren't radical enough. The Hicks sites were the ones that came along with the Hicks and I believe. The Hicks sites were Elias Hicks. So he, in the 19th century, he split with Quakerism over a number of different things. Some of it was doctrinal. He believed that Quakerism had moved too far away from what George Fox had originally wanted with the religion. And it was also over the question of immediate abolition. Elias believed that as a Quaker, you had no choice but to support immediate abolition. I recall when I was young, we attended a friend's meeting in Doylestown and it seemed to me from what I remember, that they were considering themselves as Hick sites. So... Yeah, there's still a number of groups that's... Quakers split a number of times in the 19th century. There's a lot of Quaker splits, but they've started to come back together. There's been a lot of research done on how Quakerism started to come back as a single society of friends. But there are some who still follow the teachings of Elias. But the Robinsons were definitely one of them. Right after the Hicks site split, Rallon started selling Elias Hicks's book and even advertised in the newspaper to pick up your book on the beliefs of Elias Hicks at Rookby. Any other questions? Yes? Early on, you mentioned something about the art. Down at the Rookby, could you describe a little bit about what the art is? And I also noticed on one of your slides, a T.W. Wood painting. So I didn't know if there was some relationship between T.W. Wood and a Rookby. Not that I know of now. That was just used for the exhibit. But it's mostly third and fourth generations where the artists and the family. Rallon Devins Robinson started as an artist. He started to lose his eyesight, which is what led him to writing. And he really encouraged art with his children. So his eldest daughter and also his wife, Anna, she was also an artist. So we have a lot of her artwork. She did a lot of art in nature and around the farm. But Rachel Robinson, the eldest of the fourth generation, went on to become a commercial artist. My first exhibit at Rookby was actually of her commercial. Oh yeah, go for it. My first exhibit at Rookby actually was on Rachel's commercial. She was actually very well known in the early 20th century for her commercial artwork. She illustrated books. Her postcard set from 1914 and also her 1916 postcard set of New York were deemed to have revolutionized American postcards. Believe it or not, there was a golden age of postcards. I was kind of floored when I learned that. And Rachel helped to revolutionize American postcards. They were deemed kind of boring before compared to European postcards. And those are actually held by the Library of Congress, a significant to the American story and history. So we have a lot of those items in the collection. Her younger sister, Mary, was also an artist. And she took after her mother and was interested in botanicals and was working to do a plant identification book at her death. And so we have a lot of her artwork in the collection as well. So we actually have quite a substantial artwork collection from the family. Yes. Thank you for your presentation. It was very interesting. I just want to give a plug for the Rookby. It was there once and it was very interesting. And now that we have this exhibit updated, I look forward to going there again. I like the way that the museum focuses, as you mentioned at the beginning, the family really chose a lot of stages of American history. And when you visit the site, I think you see that. And your focus today was on one important aspect of that. So that's great. I don't know if I have a question. I wanted to give you a plug. I appreciate it. I don't know. It's an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and a half or something like that. And it's really worth going over there. Yeah. And I recommend if you come on a tour day, access to the historic house is only by guided tours. And they run twice a day, 11 and 2. And you get a really good sense of all four generations and their history on one of the guided tours. And there's artwork on display in the rooms. You get more of a sense of the family as a whole through one of those tours. The exhibit solely focuses on the Underground Railroad. And it's one of the things that we're working with at the institution, and we've actually heard from the public quite a bit, is that they will come and if you don't take a tour, you miss a lot of the family and the significant aspects of how they participated in history. So we're working to try and incorporate that in more. It's one reason why we have the rotating gallery space so that we can explore different histories within the family. May 25th is when we're opening. We're opening a little later this year to give me time to get the exhibit installed. So it's May 25th to October 13th this year. Yes. You talked about the research that you do. How many people do you have available to do that research? Is that an editorial we, or do you have some volunteers that help you? We have volunteers who do our collections work for the most part. Research for this exhibit is myself and our education programs manager. We had an incredible foundation to build off of from the research done for the first exhibit. And so a lot of it's expanding on the stories. In particular, the black workers on the farm were expanding into telling their stories. A bit more tuckered did the majority of that research. The Rhode Island family, incorporating that in, that was a little bit more research. And then we also wanted to identify potential freedom seekers who came to the site. And we had a list initially of 13. And we were able to eliminate some people from that list knowing that they weren't freedom seekers. That took a lot of time. But we're a very small staff. It's myself. I'm actually the first full-time director that the museum has had. And then Tucker, our education manager, was full-time for the first time last year. And that's it. We have one seasonal person who covers the desk. And that's all of us. Volunteers do all the tours for us. And then they are really great at doing collections work. Being a tour guide, they know the family inside and out. So they're really good at helping us identify collections and family members. Yeah, you're very welcome. Thank you.