Rokeby Museum

Rokeby is the Underground Railroad site that kept its letters. The Ferrisburgh farm held four generations of Robinsons from 1793 to 1961 — Quakers who came from Newport, built Vermont's great Merino sheep operation, and in the second generation produced Rowland Thomas and Rachel Gilpin Robinson, radical abolitionists who made the farm a documented station: Rachel kept the house free of slave-made goods, and the family sheltered self-emancipators whose names survive in the family papers.

The documentation is what makes Rokeby exceptional — the National Park Service calls it among the best-documented Underground Railroad sites in the country, because the Robinsons wrote things down. The letters survive: fugitives named, routes described, the network's operation recorded by the family that ran it. The same generation founded the integrated Brick Academy in 1839, educating Black and white children together a generation before the war.

The farm kept everything else too — the sheep dip built into the rock, nine outbuildings, the 1780s house with the family's papers and possessions intact through Elizabeth Robinson's 1961 death, when the property passed to become the museum. The 'Seeking Freedom' exhibit now tells the harder whole story — including that earlier Robinson generations had themselves enslaved people, the family's own arc from enslavers to abolitionists part of the record.

Rokeby is the archive's letters file — the Vermont sheep farm where four generations of Robinsons went from enslavers to documented UGRR stationmasters, the family papers naming the freedom seekers they sheltered.