Roland W. Robbins: Difference between revisions

On July 4, 1945, the 100th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau's first day at Walden Pond, Robbins decided to look for the site of Thoreau's cabin. He used ''[[Walden]]'' and notes on the house by [[William Ellery Channing]] as a reference.<ref name="Accident" /> On November 12, 1945, he located the chimney foundations of Thoreau's house in [[Concord, Massachusetts]]. He began lecturing on his discovery and documented it in his book ''Discovery at Walden''. In 1964, Robbins reproduced Thoreau's cabin in his backyard and opened the building to the public.<ref>{{cite book|last=Sullivan|first=Mark W.|title=Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LjzaBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA69&dq|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|year=2015|isbn=9780739189078 }}</ref> Robbin's replica was visited by hundreds of people, including [[P. B. Gajendragadkar]] and [[Toshi Seeger|Toshi]] and [[Pete Seeger]].<ref name="Accident" />

In September 1948, First Iron Works Association president J. Sanger Attwill approached Robbins about trying to find the site of the Iron Works. Robbins was interested in the idea of digging at a site that was over three hundred years old, the challenge of working on a site where there little information, including no plans or sketches, and the opportunity to work at what may have been the first iron-manufacturing plant in the American colonies.<ref name=Robbins>{{cite book|last1=Robbins|first1=Roland Wells|last2=Jones|first2=Evan|title=Hidden America|url=https://archive.org/details/hiddenamerica00robb|url-access=registration|year=1959|publisher=Knopf}}</ref> Robbins' excavations uncovered the major manufacturing units of the Iron Works, including the foundations of buildings, remains of the blast furnace, holding ponds, and canal, a 500-pound hammer used in the forge, and a waterwheel that powered the bellows for the blast furnace, along with its wheel pit.<ref name=Linebaugh>{{cite bookjournal|last=Linebaugh|first=Donald W.|title=Walden Pond and Beyond|journal=The Reconstructed Past|editor=John H. Jameson Jr.|year=2004|publisher=Rowman Altamira}}</ref><ref name="Setting the Stage">{{cite web| title=Setting the Stage| publisher=National Park Service| url=http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/30saugus/30setting.htm| accessdate=July 20, 2014}}</ref> In total, more than 5,000 artifacts were found.<ref name=Linebaugh /> Robbins abruptly left the Iron Works in 1953, not long after a dispute with [[Quincy Bent]] of the [[American Iron and Steel Institute]] (the financial backer of the project), who wanted Robbins to give tours of the excavation site on weekends in addition to his other duties.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Linebaugh|first1=Donald W.|last2=Griswold|first2=William A.|title=Saugus Iron Works: The Roland W. Robbins Excavations, 1948-1953|year=2010|publisher= National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior}}</ref> Robbins also clashed with the project's architects, who he thought were ignorant about and uninterested in archeological data, and was upset with the FIWA's decision to base the reconstruction of the Iron Works primarily on documentary, rather than archeological, evidence.<ref name=Linebaugh />