Vermont farmer-sportsman and author. With little formal education, Robinson did not
begin to write until after middle age when his sight began failing, and he wrote most of
his realistic stories and nature essays after he was totally blind. Except for a few years
spent in New York City as an illustrator of magazines when he was a young man,
Robinson never left his area of Vermont. He had a lifelong interest in the folklore and
history of his region; and hiking, hunting, fishing, trapping, and sketching around his
Ferrisburgh farm enabled him to come in direct contact with the oral traditions and
material culture of his neighbors.
In realistic stories like those in Uncle Lisha’s Shop (1887), Sam Lovel’s Camps
(1889), UncleLisha’s Outing (1897), A Hero of Ticonderoga (1898), and A Danvis
Pioneer (1900), Robinson drew upon nearly every form of folklore, including speech,
proverbs, riddles, rhymes, games, beliefs, cures, songs, tales, customs, arts, crafts, and
architecture, and, utilizing the frame device, he presented this lore in authentically
reconstructed social and physical contexts. Among his writings, most of which were
collected in a seven-volume centennial edition (Robinson 1934–1938), are a history,
Vermont: A Study of Independence (1892), and collections of essays on nature and
folklife, including In New England Fields and Woods (1896) and Silver Fields and Other
Sketches of a Farmer-Sportsman (1921).
In his Author’s Note preceding the text of his fourth book of fiction, Danvis Folks
(1894), Robinson pointed out that he paid less attention to narration than to depiction of
Vermont folklife in the early part of the 19th century: “It [Danvis Folks] was written with
less purpose of telling any story than of recording the manners, customs, and speech in
vogue fifty or sixty years ago in certain parts of New England.” Since his main purpose
for writing stories was to preserve folklore, his writings offer a literary ethnography of
19th-century Vermont folklife. As Richard M.Dorson observed, in a “carefully wrought
series of vignettes portraying the folkways of a Vermont pioneer community,” Robinson
“harmonized form and material with results unequaled, in this genre, anywhere else in
American literature” (Dorson 1946:221–222).
Ronald L.Baker
References
Baker, Ronald L. 1973. Folklore in the Writings of Rowland E.Robinson. Bowling Green, OH:
Bowling Green University State Popular Press.
Dorson, Richard M. 1946. Jonathan Draws the Long Bow. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
pp. 221–230.
Martin, Terence. 1955. Rowland Evans Robinson: Realist of the Outdoors. Vermont History 23:3–
15.
Robinson, Rowland E. 1934–1938. Works of Rowland E. Robimon, ed. Llewellyn R. Perkins. 7
vols. Rutland, VT: Tuttle.