I didn’t know much about Harriet Beecher Stowe before arriving at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House – a small museum in Cincinnati – other than knowing that she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
I’m so glad I stopped in for a tour and you’ll be glad if you make it there during your time in Cincinnati. I visited during social-distancing precautions for COVID-19, so you call or email ahead to schedule a private tour for your group. I had a private tour – yes, literally just me! – with the Executive Director, Christine.
The house is relatively empty compared to other museums, but that’s not where the beauty of this place lies – it’s in the story. The story of Harriet Beecher Stowe and how her experiences in Cincinnati informed her abolitionist work and her writing including Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The house is the last remaining building of Lane Theological Seminary where major abolitionist work began with the Lane Seminary Debates and the work of Theodore Weld.
The building wasn’t protected throughout history because no one knew its future significance as a home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. However, it had an interesting story in its own right.
It became a tavern and place to stay as a part of the Green Book (a book that shared safe places for people of color to stay when they traveled) and was eventually a family home for generations until it was turned into a historical location.
As a result, a lot of changes happened to the house over the years and now they’re making changes to restore it back to its original layout.
There are displays around the house telling the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe and what led her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She was particularly impacted by the loss of her son, Charlie, because she was able to truly empathize for the first time what it was like for enslaved women to have their children taken away and sold.
You might wonder about that idea, but one of the prevailing thoughts of the day, and since the inception of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, was that black women weren’t as connected to their children and therefore would move on more quickly, while a white woman would mourn the loss of her child for life. That’s not to say that was the thought or opinion of Harriet specifically, but as with many forms of suffering, you can sympathize but you can’t truly empathize until you have your own lived experience of it.
One of the most powerful things Christine shared was the idea that the country wasn’t full of southern slavers and northern abolitionists. The north mainly saw slavery as a southern issue.
Until Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a series of stories that were published in an abolitionist friend’s newspaper. Originally it was supposed to be 4 articles. It ended up being 40 and was then bound as a book. Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the way people in the north viewed slavery by making it something real – not just something happening “over there.”
While she’s best known for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a prolific writer and you can see a list of her articles and books below. There are some concerns about how the characters are written in the story, particularly Uncle Tom. While it is a work of fiction it is rooted in real stories.
She released a follow-up book which was essentially a bibliography of her research – of all the stories she heard and collected, from free blacks and enslaved people she met as they traveled through Cincinnati as a part of the Underground Railroad, to share what is considered one of the driving forces behind the change in public opinion in the north that culminated in the Civil War only 11 years later.
Upstairs in the museum is an interactive area for kids (this was closed due to COVID-19, but I was allowed to take a few pictures), a community meeting room and an installation about the commercial history of Cincinnati. “Porkopolis” as it was known, while technically being in the north, had strong economic ties to slavery in the south.
When I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe House there was also a traveling exhibit about the suffrage movement and the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. There are a lot of connections between abolitionists and suffragists that intersect here in Cincinnati – specifically Henry Stanton, who worked with Theodore Weld in their endeavors to help black citizens gain an education and social equality in Cincinnati, married Elizabeth Cady (Stanton) who worked with Susan B. Anthony for equal rights for women.
There’s an extensive bookstore which also holds the offices for museum staff. When I visited they even had headbands and masks by a local artisan that celebrated the 100th anniversary. I ended up getting some postcards, a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a handmade headband.
Harriet Beecher Stowe House Ticket Prices
The value you get for your ticket price is incredible. At the time of writing it cost $6 per adult, even with the private tour, and it took about an hour (and I was moving pretty quickly – I didn’t read everything available in that time). You can’t go wrong checking out this small, but historically important and interesting museum.
Address
2950 Gilbert Ave, Cincinnati, OH 45206
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