The Harriet Beecher Stowe House: Nook Farm and the Book That Shook a Nation

The house on Forest Street in Hartford's Nook Farm neighborhood looks like a comfortable Victorian cottage with Gothic decorative touches, big enough for a family, modest by the standards of the literary set who gathered there. Harriet Beecher Stowe bought it in eighteen seventy-three and lived in it for the last twenty-three years of her life. She finished her last novel here in eighteen seventy-eight. She tended her kitchen garden obsessively. On pleasant days she walked to the house next door to visit her neighbor, who happened to be Mark Twain.

Stowe had already changed the world by the time she moved to Hartford. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in eighteen fifty-two, first as a serial in an abolitionist newspaper, then as a book that sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year in the United States and, within a few years, more than a million copies in Britain. It was the second-best-selling book of the nineteenth century in America after the Bible. The novel put the emotional reality of enslavement in front of readers who had managed to keep it abstract, and it did so through scenes of family separation, maternal grief, and individual cruelty that were impossible to abstract away. Abraham Lincoln, meeting Stowe at the White House in eighteen sixty-two, is said to have called her the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war, though historians debate whether he actually said it. The sentiment was genuine regardless.

The house is now a National Historic Landmark and museum operated as the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, formally dedicated to what the center calls literary activism. The mahogany drop-leaf table on which Stowe drafted parts of Uncle Tom's Cabin is still in the house. Nook Farm, the neighborhood, was an intentional literary community where writers and reformers built their lives in close proximity to each other and, apparently, close proximity made them more productive.