Hannah Simonds was born into one of the oldest Lexington families, famous for their resistance to British tyranny during the American Revolution. Born in 1786 Hannah grew up in a large family of landowners, farmers, and tavern owners, and was a member of First Parish Church. Her father Joshua Simonds risked his life on April 19, 1775 when he threatened to blow up a powder keg and himself in the meeting house rather than turn the powder over to the approaching British regulars. During her childhood the hastily constructed Articles of Confederation government of the United States failed and was replaced by the Constitution. The economy of the new nation went through years of struggle which offered uncertain prospects for the new generation coming of age in the early 19th century. In 1809, Hannah married merchant Eli Robbins whose mother Abigail descended from the Winship family. The Winships had long held a large part of East Lexington’s Great Meadow as a land grant from Massachusetts Bay Colony. Stephen and his son Eli Robbins had become prosperous in the furrier business: turning animal fur into beaver hats, fur mittens and muffs, as well as waterproof coats and boots.

When Hannah married Eli Robbins they moved into a house across the street from his parents and his sister Caira in East Lexington, and in the early years of their marriage Eli expanded his father’s business to include taverns, mills, landholding, farming, a dry goods store. Hannah may have assisted her husband in his fur manufacturing business as her daughters did. For example, the Robbins daughters sewed fur garments together for sale. At the corner of what is now Pleasant and Massachusetts Avenue, Hannah ran their large household that included lodgers, including her nephew George Simonds, servants, and son Eli Jr. and daughters Hannah Maria, Abigail, Ellen, Mary, and Julia. Mary died in childhood and Hannah Maria was deaf, but Hannah was eager to have her other daughters educated, by sending them to female academies.

After Eli built the Brick Store and then the meeting place and lyceum, Robbins Hall which is now called the Ellen Stone Building, he emerged as a community leader, which changed Hannah’s daily life. In addition to her many household duties, she entertained visitors and gave parties. When Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson stopped preaching in the Stone Building, Eli Robbins invited the Transcendentalist educator Bronson Alcott to give Twelve Conversations to the citizens of East Lexington, for which he was paid $30. Bronson Alcott commented that the almost fifty people who made up the Robbins circle were wisely receptive to his teachings: “These people are quite simple. They are not seeking conformity with historical creeds, but insight into truth, as it relates to their special growth in grace. They are not alarmed by novel doctrines.” Emerson also found Alcott’s talk worthy and sometimes attended his Boston lectures, and Alcott also befriended Rev. Charles Follen and attended his lectures on pantheism, i.e. worldwide religions that viewed God inhabiting nature. Hannah attended and even hosted some of Alcott’s conversation and entertained overnight Alcott and his wife, the anti-slavery activist Abigail “Abba” May Alcott, later immortalized by her daughter Louisa May Alcott as Marmee in Little Women. A friendship grew between Abba May Alcott and Hannah Robbins and they worked together to bring Henry David Thoreau to speak in Robbins Hall about his essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Abba May Alcott also brought her daughters, Anna, Elizabeth, Louisa May, and Abigail to meet the Robbins daughters at Hannah and Eli’s home. While the East Lexington Robbins daughters had known a stable, affluent home an excellent schooling experiences, the Alcott daughters, because of their father’s inability or unwillingness to hold down a job, had known poverty, little formal schooling, and had moved 21 times in 30 years. Years later, Louisa May Alcott was forced by this harsh economic reality to clean houses, work as a servant, and to write for money. Fortunately, by the late 1860s Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women became a best-selling novel which brought the Alcotts out of poverty. Hannah and Eli Robbins also faced bankruptcy during the economic panic of 1837, but Eli was able to hold onto much of his property by putting it in other family members’ names.

What Abba May and Hannah Robbins had in common was their commitment to their daughters and the anti-slavery cause. Like her cousin Rev. Theodore Parker, Hannah admired the courage of their Lexington ancestors who fought in the famous Battle of 1775. At a time in the 1830s when abolitionists were regularly attacked by mobs hostile to their crusade against the profitable institution of slavery, Theodore Parker and Hannah were drawn to the unpopular cause of anti-slavery because of their family legacy of defending freedom. Theodore Parker became a great hero to Hannah’s daughters Ellen and Julia, and they often traveled to Boston to hear the eloquent Parker preach against the evils of enslavement. The Alcotts, when they settled for a while in Concord, became part of the intellectual circle that included Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but Abba May, like the Thoreau family, was so committed to freedom for black Americans that she became a station master on the Underground Railroad.

For many years Hannah entertained and befriended many anti-slavery luminaries, including Rev. Samuel May (Minister of First Parish for a short time, Principal of the Normal School for Teachers, and William Lloyd Garrison’s most active anti-slavery agent), Parker Pillsbury (famous for speaking against slavery and denouncing churches for failure to speak up against slavery), and Eliza Follen (novelist and children’s author and anti-slavery advocate) and Charles Follen (professor, writer, minister of what would later become Follen Church). Eli Robbins hosted Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson as a preacher and a lyceum lecturer, too. In the 1840s after Hannah’s daughter Abigail married Rev. Stillman Luther Lothrop who founded a coeducational academy, the East Lexington Institute in the Stone Building. Later, speakers like U.S. Senator Charles Sumner and abolitionist and women’s rights activist Lucy Stone lectured in the lyceum hall, Hannah had a chance to meet and listen to some of the great thinkers of her era.

In an era when women were supposed to act only as “angels of the house,” they were not allowed to speak in public or attend the majority of colleges. Women were also not allowed to vote in national elections. Hannah lived in an ante-bellum era when mobs burned down halls where women dared to speak. Her expectations for herself and her daughters were necessarily restricted, but she still remained active politically. Hannah also served on the Executive Committee of the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, which sometimes held meetings in her family’s lyceum hall. Late in life Hannah signed petitions to protest the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slavecatchers to pursue and capture free Blacks and self-emancipated Blacks across the North. In the years when anti-slavery activists faced public hostility and outright attack, Hannah welcomed them to her home. With Hannah’s active support the Stone Building became “one of the early centers of free-thinking and discussion for religious, philosophical and cultural groups.” Racial equality, women’s rights, utopian communities, religious freedom, and a religion more attuned to individual spirituality and nature percolated under Hannah’s roof.

The later years of Hannah’s life brought loss and family conflict. Eli died in 1856 and Eli Jr. moved to New York to join his Arlington cousins in business. Hannah’s oldest daughter Hannah Maria stayed close to her mother, but daughters Abigail, Ellen, and eventually Julia married men sympathetic with the anti-slavery cause. Abigail’s marriage broke up and she lived with her sister Ellen and Ellen’s husband Abner Stone from 1851-1872. Evidently, Hannah expected Julia, who remained single until she was 41, to stay at home to help care for her and the rest of the family and to devote her life to sorting out the financial aftermath of Eli’s bankruptcy. Julia, however, had other goals. She was independent enough to seek a paid career of her own. Julia took the train to Boston and studied at the School of Design where she studied art and met leaders of the women’s movement like Ednah Dow Cheney and Lucy Stone. The Lowell Mills hired Julia Robbins as a textile designer and she supported herself and lived independently for some years.

Though the historical record is unclear about how the tension in the Robbins family came about, Julia and Hannah became estranged in the 1850s. Ellen remained on good terms with everyone, but Hannah was angry with her daughter when Julia returned home and decided to marry John Barrett, a Concord farmer. Hannah died during the Civil War in late 1864 and was buried with Eli in the Simonds plot in the First Parish Cemetery. Hannah may not have been as much of a rebel as her daughter Julia, but she was remembered by William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator thus: “DIED-In East Lexington, Dec. 13tb, Mrs. HANNAH S. ROBBINS, wife of the late Eli Bobbins, Esq., aged 78 years. She was ever a true friend to the slave. She will be remembered by many laborers in the Anti-Slavery cause for her kind co-operation and hospitality.”