Harriet Beecher Stowe

Notable people · Writer · Abolitionist

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), much of whose material came from her eighteen years in Cincinnati on the border with slaveholding Kentucky.

Born June 14, 1811, Litchfield, CT
Died July 1, 1896, Hartford, CT

No known restrictions · Wikimedia Commons

At a glance

Born: June 14, 1811, Litchfield, CT source
Died: July 1, 1896, Hartford, CT source
Buried: Phillips Academy cemetery, Andover source
Also known as: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Education: Hartford Female Seminary, Hartford, CT
Known as: Writer, Abolitionist

Life story

Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811, one of eleven children of the preacher Lyman Beecher. She studied at the Hartford Female Seminary run by her sister Catharine.

In 1832 she moved to Cincinnati when her father became president of Lane Seminary. She lived in the Ohio area until 1850, married the professor Calvin Stowe in 1836, and saw the city's slavery debates close up across the river.

After moving to Maine she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, serialized from 1851 and published as a book in 1852. It sold about 300,000 copies in a year.

She wrote more than thirty books, toured Britain in 1853, met Lincoln in 1862, and died in Hartford in 1896. Her Cincinnati home is now a museum.

Ohio ties

Cincinnati (Walnut Hills) (1832-1850)
lived at and near Lane Theological Seminary, where her father was president and her husband taught Hamilton County · source
Cincinnati (Walnut Hills), 2950 Gilbert Avenue (1833-1836)
lived in the Lyman Beecher house at intervals until her 1836 marriage; her twins were born there in 1836 Hamilton County · source
Ripley (1830s-1840s)
John Rankin's Underground Railroad station, source of the Eliza story Brown County · source

Timeline

1832 Moved to Cincinnati with her father, Lyman Beecher, the new president of Lane Theological Seminary; cholera had already reached the city that autumn. source
1833 Visited Washington, Kentucky, and was taken to see a slave auction in nearby Maysville. source
1834 Attended most of the Lane Debates on colonization and abolition, after which many students left the seminary. source
1836 Married widowed Lane professor Calvin Ellis Stowe at the seminary on January 6; twin daughters Eliza and Harriet were born in the Beecher house later that year. source
1838 The Rankin family in Ripley sheltered a woman who had crossed the frozen Ohio River with her child, the story later told to Calvin Stowe at Lane and used for Eliza. source
1849 Her son Samuel Charles (Charley), about eighteen months old, died in Cincinnati's cholera epidemic, which killed about three thousand people in the city. source
1850 Moved to Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin Stowe took a post at Bowdoin College. source
1943 The Ohio Historical Society bought the Beecher house on Gilbert Avenue, saving it from demolition. source
1970 The Harriet Beecher Stowe House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 10, the same day as the Rankin House in Ripley. source

What Harriet is known for

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
Dred (1856)
The Minister's Wooing (1859)
Oldtown Folks (1869)

Stories

Charley and the cholera summer of 1849

Cholera was already in Cincinnati when Harriet arrived in the autumn of 1832, carried along the Ohio River. It came back hard in 1849, killing about three thousand people in the city, a toll worsened by contaminated water and the waste of Cincinnati's pork-packing trade. One of the dead was her son Charley, about eighteen months old. With no treatment to offer, she could only watch, and she wrote to her husband that she had little hope. She later said the circumstances of his death were so bitter that she could only be reconciled to it if it allowed her to do some great good for others. The Stowe House interprets that loss as the root of the novel's grieving slave mothers; the family left Ohio the next year.

Source

The woman on the ice

John Rankin's house sat on a hilltop above Ripley, visible from the Kentucky shore. In 1838 the Rankins took in a woman who had crossed the half-frozen Ohio River with her child in her arms. Rankin later visited Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, where one of his sons studied, and told the story to Professor Calvin Stowe. Harriet heard it too, and the crossing became Eliza's escape across the ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Other families along the river later claimed to be the source of the story, so the details rest partly on tradition.

Source

Honors and things named for them

National Women's Hall of Fame (1986)
75-cent U.S. stamp (2007)
Harris-Stowe State University, St. Louis

Family

father: Lyman Beecher
husband: Calvin Ellis Stowe

Sites to know

Homes, graves, markers, museums and monuments; the numbered ones are on the map.

1 Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Lyman Beecher house, last surviving Lane Seminary building)
Cincinnati, 2950 Gilbert Avenue Hamilton County · source
2 John Rankin House (National Historic Landmark)
Ripley, 6152 Rankin Hill Rd. Brown County · source

Places in Ohio to see

Harriet Beecher Stowe House (museum)
2950 Gilbert Ave, Cincinnati, Hamilton County ZIP 45206 · Cincinnati · Hamilton County

Ohio places

Where Harriet Beecher Stowe was born, lived, worked and is remembered, with the ZIP code, town and county pages for each.

Lived: Cincinnati, Hamilton County (Harriet Beecher Stowe House, 2950 Gilbert Ave) ZIP 45206 · Cincinnati · Hamilton County

Myths and corrections

Things often said about Harriet Beecher Stowe, and what the record shows.

Often said Lincoln greeted Stowe as the little woman who wrote the book that started the Civil War.

The record The line comes from a family account by her son; historian Daniel R. Vollaro found it apocryphal, and Stowe's own accounts of meeting Lincoln were vague. source

Often said Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in Cincinnati.

The record She gathered much of its material in Cincinnati, but she wrote it after moving to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850; it was serialized in 1851-52. source

Disputed: One source has her staying in Cincinnati until her marriage in 1836. An earlier account gave 1832 to 1850, the years her family lived in the city.

Pictures

Free to use with the credit shown. Select a picture for the original and its license.

Public domain
Portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe, age 71 (1882). Engraving of a photo originally taken by Ritz & Hastings
Public domain
No known restrictions
An engraving of Harriet Beecher Stowe from 1872, based on an oil painting by Alonzo Chappel, published by John...
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Portrait of United States author Harriet Beecher Stowe in later life
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Engraved portrait of United States author Harriet Beecher Stowe at mid-life
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Title: Author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe Abstract/medium: 1 photograph : albumen print on card mou...
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Title: Author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe] / Howell, 867 & 869 B'way Abstract/medium: 1 photogr...
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Group portrait of the Beecher family. Photograph includes, standing from left to right, Thomas, William, Edwar...
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Public domain
Image of Harriet Beecher Stowe (b. 1811-1896)
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Harriet Beecher-Stowe, American abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
Public domain