Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut Brings History to Life

Harriet Beecher Stowe was not, as Abraham Lincoln once famously but ironically said to her, the little woman who began the Civil War. But the famed abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin holds a historic place in American literature, and her Hartford, Connecticut home is a reflection of her prominent literary role.

Twenty years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and almost a decade after Lincoln's death and the end of the war, Harriet and her husband Calvin, a retired professor, moved into a brick Victorian Gothic cottage-style house on Forest Street in Hartford. The house was located in a neighborhood known as Nook Farm, which became a widely-celebrated intellectual and literary enclave.

A year after the Stowes and their adult twin daughters moved into the house, author Samuel Clemens - better-known as Mark Twain - and his family built a house on the adjoining lot. Stowe's sister, the noted women's rights activist Isabella Beecher Hooker, also lived in the Nook Farm neighborhood.

Today, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center incorporates three buildings - the Stowe House, the next-door home of Stowe's grand-niece and the driving force between the preservation of both Stowe's and Twain's homes, Katherine Seymour Day, and a visitor's center housed in a home which was also built in the Nook Farm neighborhood in the mid-19^th century.

The author's home, which can be seen on a guided tour, includes many of the family's original belongings. Much of the artwork acquired by Stowe on her frequent trips to Europe is on display, as well as some of her own paintings. The furnishings are those chosen and arranged by Stowe herself.

The Day house is home to the center's library, begun with Stowe's own collection and expanded through Day's personal acquisitions. It includes over 12,000 volumes in its underground stacks, highlighted by first-edition books by Stowe and members of her famous family, as well as correspondence with historic figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

In the summer months, the center opens its exquisite Victorian gardens to the public as well. A total of eight gardens on the two-and-a-half acre site are open to the public. Included on the grounds are the state's oldest magnolia tree and a flowering pink dogwood that remains from when Stowe walked the grounds herself.

Visitors can also take a self-guided walking tour of the Nook Farm neighborhood with the help of a map available at the Stowe Center.

One of the factors that keeps the center vibrant is the continuing series of educational and literary events that are held there year-round. "Salons at Stowe," for instance, is series of group discussions on a variety of topics that are held regularly, and which are led by prominent experts on issues but which are open to the public for participation. They are reminiscent of the kinds of intellectual discussions that would have been held in the parlors of Nook Farm homes such as Stowe's or Twain's in the late 1800s.