Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1548
Robinson Tavern
Brick in the Edward A. Huebener Brick Collection at the Dorchester Historical Society was taken from the Robinson Tavern building and an artist painted the picture of the tavern on the face of the brick.
Lemuel Robinson owned the Liberty Tree Tavern, where the Sons of Liberty met in the summer of 1769. The Lemuel Robinson Tavern “stood on the east side of the upper road (Washington St.) near the present Fuller Street.” In the map Fuller is the east-west street just south of Bailey Street. [Although the implication is that there is the house and a separate tavern, it is just possible that the illustration of the tavern is supposed to be the Royall-Dolbeare House since the locations noted by different sources are so close to each other. On the other hand, it may be that Lemuel inherited the property nearer Fuller Street as part of his own parents’ estate.]
Early in 1774 a meeting was called of all the towns of Suffolk County, which then embraced all of Norfolk County, to consider active measures of resistance to the exactions of the Crown and to the infringements of the liberties of the colonies. The Convention appointed a committee that produced the Suffolk Resolves and named men of the various towns, including Captain Lemuel Robinson of Dorchester, to be a committee to wait on his Excellency the governor, “to inform him that this county is alarmed at the fortifications making on Boston Neck, and to remonstrate against the same, and the repeated insults offered by the soldiery to persons passing and repassing into that town …” In May of 1774, Capt. Lemuel Robinson was appointed to act as representative of Dorchester at the General Court to be held at Salem.
Colonel Robinson, commissioned at the outbreak of hostilities, at once took an active part in recruiting troops. A few days after the Battle of Lexington, fearing an invasion of Dorchester, Col. Robinson sent his family to Stoughton, where they took refuge with Samuel Tucker, whose wife was a cousin of Mrs. Robinson’s. Robinson’s own house became the recruiting station for the regiment, and the temporary residence of alarmed families from “the neck” who occupied it until the return of its owners later in the season.
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