Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9402030006
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOCELYN McCLURG THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: HARTFORD, CONN. LENGTH: Long
Stowe spent the last 23 years of her long life in the cozy ``cottage,'' just across the lawn from the eccentric mansion of her Nook Farm neighbor, that young upstart Mark Twain. Stowe, in her 60s in the 1870s, was old enough to be Samuel Clemens' mother, and so established a literary figure as to be thought a bit old-fashioned by younger readers.
During her lifetime (1811-1896), Stowe became a sensation; she was a prolific author whose most famous book made her a superstar, 19th-century style. ``Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' published in 1852, sold 350,000 copies in America its first year in print. And that was just the beginning. The novel about the cruelties of slavery was translated into many foreign languages and adapted into a long-running hit play.
Before there was a Madison Avenue, ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'' was a marketer's dream: Spinoffs included wallpaper, toys, games, plates, statuettes and other ``Tomitudes.'' A Staffordshire figurine of Uncle Tom and Little Eva is on display in the rear parlor of the Stowe house. Stowe made no money from this barrage of knicknacks.
While ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'' ensures Stowe's place in the American pantheon, it's only part of the Stowe story. The Harriet Beecher Stowe House provides an intriguing opportunity to hear the rest. Inside, the house is furnished with characteristically ornate Victorian pieces (many of which belonged to Stowe), but in a homier and far less ostentatious style than Twain's house. Harriet Beecher Stowe was reform-minded on a number of frontiers, among them the domestic front. With her sister, Catharine Beecher, she co-wrote ``The American Woman's Home.'' The kitchen in the Stowe house has been re-created using the two sisters' common-sense suggestions.
Stowe wasn't exactly the Martha Stewart of her day, but she was an enthusiastic gardener and an accomplished amateur painter. Her paintings appear throughout the house and are worth a close look. The dining room has several of Stowe's floral paintings. Also of note in the dining room is the pretty violet china pattern Stowe designed, which was manufactured by the Minton Co. Stowe's tranquil mixed-media rendering of Casco Bay, Maine, and her small portrait of her Florida winter home in Mandarin hang in her bedroom.
Further evidence of her artistic skills are on view in the sitting room off her bedroom, which holds a bureau, bedside stand and cane-seated chair Stowe decorated.
While there's nothing shabby about the way the Stowes lived, it wasn't lifestyles of the rich and famous, either. Harriet was the primary breadwinner in her family, and there were frequent financial worries before ``Uncle Tom's Cabin''; her husband, Calvin Stowe, was a professor of Greek and sacred literature.
The Forest Street house, built in 1871, was not the Stowes' first Hartford home. In 1864 she built Oakholm, her dream house, an eight-gabled Gothic villa at the southeastern edge of Nook Farm. But it became too expensive and burdensome to maintain, and Calvin Stowe had become ill, so the Stowes sold it. (Oakholm no longer stands.) In an 1872 letter to her children, Stowe called the more modest Forest Street property a ``lovely beautiful house'' whose ``terms are quite within my means,'' according to a forthcoming biography, ``Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life'' by Trinity College professor Joan D. Hedrick.
Stowe's Connecticut connections ran deep. She was born in Litchfield, where her father, Lyman Beecher, was pastor of the Congregational Church. (Harriet's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, also became an influential preacher). In 1824 she came to Hartford to study and later teach in her sister Catharine's school, the Hartford Female Seminary. Several years later Harriet moved to Cincinnati with her father, who was to head the Lane Theological Seminary. There she met Calvin Stowe, a widower whom she married in 1836. Her experiences in Ohio, a border state, were to have a profound influence on ``Uncle Tom's Cabin.''
The Stowes, who had seven children (four of whom predeceased Harriet), lived in Brunswick, Maine, and Andover, Mass., before settling in Hartford. The Beecher pull was strong. John Hooker and his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Harriet's half-sister, lived on Nook Farm by the Park River.
Harriet (Hattie) and Eliza, the Stowes' unmarried, grown twin daughters, moved with their parents into the Forest Street house. Their bedroom, along with the bedrooms of Harriet and Calvin, are part of the Stowe house tour. The twins kept house for their mother, and in her final years Harriet remained a celebrity whose Hartford visitors included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William T. Sherman.
In 1878, she published ``Poganuc People,'' her ode to her New England childhood and the last act in a literary career that spanned 44 years and more than 30 books. Calvin died in 1886, and as Harriet aged she became increasingly senile and sometimes given to bizarre behavior.
The restoration of Stowe's house (and Mark Twain's house) was largely the doing of Harriet's grandniece, Katharine Seymour Day. She established the Stowe-Day Foundation, which is now housed in the 19th-century mansion next door to the Stowe house.
The first floor of the foundation's headquarters is an exhibition area that is included in the Stowe house tour. The current display documents Stowe's triumphant 1853 tour of Europe, the year after ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'' had awakened readers around the world to the horrors of slavery.
by CNB