Aboard the Underground Railroad-- Harriet Beecher Stowe House--Ohio

Harriet Beecher Stowe House
Photograph courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society.

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This house was once the residence of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), the influential antislavery author who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1832, Harriet Beecher moved from Litchfield, Connecticut, to Cincinnati with her sister and father, a Congregationalist minister who accepted an offer to teach at the Lane Seminary. Harriet and her sister lived with their father in this house, which was provided by the Seminary, and soon after settling in established the Western Female Institute. In 1833, while teaching at the Western Female Institute, the two sisters published Geography for Children. The following year Harriet Beecher won a prize for "New England Sketch," published in the Western Monthly Magazine. Marrying Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at Lane Seminary, in 1836, Harriet Beecher Stowe moved out of her father's house and into a nearby home in the Walnut Hills area. In the following years, however, Stowe would be a frequent visitor to this house where she and her family would meet with like-minded antislavery activists.

Stowe witnessed the evils of slavery first-hand while touring the neighboring state of Kentucky and visited the home of abolitionist John Rankin in Ripley, Ohio. During her residency in Ohio, she interviewed several former slaves who had escaped to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Many of the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin mirrored real-life individuals such as Josiah Henson, a fugitive slave who escaped from Kentucky to Canada via the Underground Railroad with his wife and two children. While living in Cincinnati, Stowe also befriended Dr. Gamaliel Bailey who helped run the magazine Philanthropy and who would later become editor of National Era, the antislavery weekly that first published Uncle Tom's Cabin in serial format. In 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe moved from Ohio to Brunswick, Maine, after her husband accepted a teaching position at Bowdoin College. Writing Uncle Tom's Cabin after arriving in Maine, Stowe drew upon her Ohio experiences which inspired her to write the book that would expose the horrors of slavery on a national level.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is located at 2950 Gilbert Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio. It is open to the public May 1st - Labor Day on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturdary from 10:00am to 3:00pm. In April and the fall it is only open Tuesday and Wednesday from 10:00am to 2:00pm, and the first Saturday of the month from 9:00am to 12:00pm. Additionally, a cultural program is offered the last Sunday of every month from 4:00pm to 6:00pm. Appointments should be made for group tours. Call 513/751-0651 for further information.
Visit Washington, Kentucky, home of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Slavery to Freedom Museum.

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