Harriet Beecher Stowe House

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is a historic home in Ohio which was once the residence of influential antislavery author Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.BackgroundRev. Lyman Beecher accepted a job at Lane Theological Seminary in the Walnut Hills area of Cincinnati, founded in 1830. Rev. Beecher was a Congregationalist minister. He had dreamed of moving west to promote his brand of Christianity as early as 1830, when he wrote to his daughter Catharine: "I have thought seriously of going over to Cincinnati, the London of the West, to spend the remnant of my days in that great conflict, and in consecrating all my children to God in that region who are willing to go. If we gain the West, all is safe; if we lose it, all is lost."In September 1832, 21-year old Harriet Beecher (not yet Mrs. Stowe) moved with her family from Litchfield, Connecticut to Ohio. The company included her father, her stepmother, her aunt Esther, her siblings Catharine and George, and half-siblings Isabella, Thomas, and James. The extended family previously had not been living together but the various parts of the family from Boston and Hartford met in New York to being their trip together. Along the way, they traveled through other eastern cities to raise money for the seminary. The journey was long and difficult. Isabella later recalled, "After a week in Philadelphia, we chartered a big, old-fashioned stage, with four great horses, for Wheeling, Virginia, and spent a week or more on the way, crossing the Alleghenies, before ever a railroad was thought of, and enjoyed every minute of the way." They amused themselves by singing hymns while the journey that normally took 48 hours stretched to eight days.