Harriet Beecher Stowe House

In eighteen thirty-two, a young woman named Harriet Beecher moved to Cincinnati with her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, newly appointed president of Lane Theological Seminary. The brick house Lane built for the family still stands here, and it shaped American history.

During eighteen years in Cincinnati, Harriet crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky and witnessed a slave auction. Those experiences never left her. She later channeled them into Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in eighteen fifty-two, which sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year and became one of the most influential novels in United States history.

The house had a second chapter too. Later it operated as the Edgemont Inn, a boarding house for African Americans. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.