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Spring
cleaning at Robbins Farm Park will be May 18. We will pick
up trash, rake leaves and branches, spread loam over eroded
places, plant grass, and rake the sand in the playground--whatever
needs to be done and whatever we can do to prepare for the
summer rebuilding. Our first clean-up day was May 1, 1999.
The next year we tackled the abandoned tennis courts clearing
out the weeds and glass, and that led to the idea of painting
the fence -- hence the green fence. But as described elsewhere,
the park's rehabilitation is under way, and the abandoned
courts will be removed. Seventy years ago, spring
was a time for planting the carrots and beans and corn that
Nathan Robbins cultivated at his Farm. In May
he would have started harvesting asparagus
spears and then rhubarb, 35 cents a bunch for freshly cut
asparagus, rhubarb at 5 cents a pound. As for corn, "He had
the most delicious corn you ever ate! I think it was 35 cents
a dozen. At the end of the season he would give you what he
called the nubbins, little pieces that weren't quite right
-- he would fill a bag and give it to you. He was a very sensitive
man you know. He wanted that farm as an open space for the
children. He liked the children." The above quotes are from
my book, "Robbins Farm, a Local
History." When I first put together the book, I thought the
farm was started in the 1880s when Nathan Robbins Sr.,
whose fortune graced the Town with its Library and Town Hall,
built his mansion
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on
the top of the hill, where the abandoned tennis courts are
now. But reading "West Cambridge, 1775", which is a
remarkable oral history of the Revolutionary War in Arlington
-- April 19, 1775, which we now celebrate as Patriot's Day
-- came across the following passage: "The
strong British flanking guards on either side of the road
back to Cambridge and Boston gave them opportunity for violence
and plunder. Hardly a dwelling on their way escaped.
On the summit of what we call 'Peirce's Hill' was a house
occupied by Mr. Robbins. The family had fled on the approach
of the enemy. The flank guard ransacked the premises, destroyed
the clock, and set fire to the kitchen floor, which was extinguished
by the wet clothes falling upon it, after it had burned off
the lines." Reverend Samuel Abbott Smith gathered the
stories and wrote the book in 1864, available at the Arlington
Historical Society's Smith Museum; most of the memories were
from children remembering their
parent's stories, but one elderly woman was a young child
on that day and still remembered the day's events!
Arlington was originally incorporated as West
Cambridge, and earlier had been known
as Menotomy Village. Further research revealed
that in 1739 a Joseph Robbins purchased 12 acres from Phillip
Shattuck in Cambridge Rocks, as
Arlington Heights was known at the time. And
a 1750 map of Menotomy shows a farm near Peirce Hill labeled
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