FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
December 22, 2020
Media Contact: Christina Hartlieb
513-751-0651
chartlieb@stowehousecincy.org
                                                                                                                                               
Watching Time Roll Back at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House

House’s original architecture uncovered as porch, paint, and bay windows are removed
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(CINCINNATI, OH)– The big white house at the corner of Gilbert and MLK in Walnut Hills looks dramatically different right now. Restoration crews have been working steadily for several months uncovering the original style and architecture of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. The house’s original Federal architectural style is now clear to see.

Up to 17 layers of paint have been removed from the brick home, revealing infinite details about how the house was constructed in 1832 when it was built as the president’s home for Lane Theological Seminary. The house’s memorable large front porch, which was added in the early 20th century has also been removed, uncovering outlines of the smaller portico from the mid 19th century. Restoration crews also removed large bay windows on both the first and second floors of the home, taking the house’s footprint back to the early 1800s.

According to Executive Director Christina Hartlieb, this restoration is daily revealing fascinating new information about how the house was put together and how various members of the Beecher family may have used the rooms during their nearly twenty-year residence in Cincinnati. Revealing the original façade helps the site’s visitors get an immediate sense of the Beecher’s time period in ways that had been more difficult when the history was hidden under decades of new additions.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House remains OPEN to tours by appointment during this restoration project. 2021 book clubs, discussion groups and lectures will begin online in February.

Built in 1832, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House was originally the president’s home on the campus of Lane Theological Seminary. It is the final property remaining from the campus in Walnut Hills. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who moved to Cincinnati with her father at the age of 21, lived in Cincinnati for 18 years and went on to write the influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. During the 1930s-1940s the house served as an African American boarding house and tavern listed in the Green Motorist Book.  This historic site is located at 2950 Gilbert Avenue in Cincinnati.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is an Ohio History Connection historic site and is managed locally by the Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House. For more information on the site, visit www.stowehousecincy.org or call 513-751-0651.

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ABOUT HARRIET BEECHER STOWE HOUSE
The nonprofit Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House manages a Cincinnati home where Harriet Beecher Stowe lived during the formative years that led her to write the best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This historic site is part of the Ohio History Connection’s network of more than 50 sites and museums across Ohio. For more information about programs and events, call 513-751-0651 or visit www.stowehousecincy.org.
 
Ohio History Connection
The Ohio History Connection, formerly the Ohio Historical Society, is a statewide history organization with the mission to spark discovery of Ohio’s stories. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization chartered in 1885, the Ohio History Connection carries out history services for Ohio and its citizens focused on preserving and sharing the state’s history. This includes housing the state historic preservation office, the official state archives, local history office and managing more than 50 sites and museums across Ohio. For more information on programs and events, visit ohiohistory.org

During our recent volunteers Zoom meeting participants were asked to answer 7 multiple choice trivia questions. Only one of these failed to get one correct response from the over 20 folks participating:

“Which painter wrote of Harriet that she “helps us to understand how applicable the Gospel is in this day and age,” and later included Uncle Tom's Cabin in a still life?
a.            Winslow Homer
b.            Thomas Kinkade
c.             Georgia O’Keefe
d.            Vincent Van Gogh”
No one chose the correct answer – “d”.

I learned of Van Gogh’s admiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe this past July from an article written for a daily email newsletter which I receive, the “Literary Hub.” Entitled “The Writers Vincent van Gogh Loved, From Charles Dickens to Harriet Beecher Stowe: 6 Books Essential to Our Understanding of the Artist,” it was written by Mariella Guzzoni, an independent scholar and art curator living in Bergamo, Italy. Over many years, she has collected editions of the books that Vincent van Gogh read and loved.  In March the University of Chicago Press published her study “Vincent's Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him.”

Ms. Guzzoni writes of Van Gogh: “Vincent was an avid and multilingual reader, a man who could not do without books. In his brief life he devoured hundreds of them in four languages, spanning centuries of art and literature. Throughout his life, his reading habits reflected his various personae—art dealer, preacher, painter—and were informed by his desire to learn, discuss, and find his own way to be of service to humanity.” 

In June 1880 Van Gogh wrote in a letter that he had been reading Beecher Stowe.
Ms. Guzzoni writes: “Vincent, 27, is in the mining region of the Borinage, in Belgium. For a year and a half he has been among the miners, seeking to console the workers of the underworld. He is at a dead end. He cuts himself off from the world, and immerses himself in reading. Two books were crucial in what was to become the period of his rebirth as an artist: Histoire de la révolution française (History of the French Revolution, in 9 volumes), by the greatest of the French romantic historians, Jules Michelet, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novel that helped foment anti-slavery sentiment in the United States and abroad.

Michelet’s new approach to writing history dared to give the People agency, placing them firmly at the center of the revolutionary dynamic. Vincent, too, would put the faces of the People at the center of his revolution in portraiture. Michelet himself described Beecher Stowe as “the woman who wrote the greatest success of the time, translated into every language and read around the world, having become the Gospel of liberty for a race.”

What are the common themes? The fight for freedom and independence; the moral importance of literature; the plight of the poor and deprived. Both books were modern gospels for Vincent in a moment of great doubt, when he rejected the “established religious system.” “Take Michelet and Beecher Stowe, they don’t say, the gospel is no longer valid, but they help us to understand how applicable is it in this day and age, in this life of ours, for you, for instance, and for me…”

In Van Gogh’s painting “L'Arlésienne (portrait of Madame Ginoux),” of which there are more than one version, there are two books on the table. One is Dickens' Christmas Tales and the other Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 

The Louisiana Purchase was by far the largest territorial gain in United States history, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. After Louisiana became a state the Purchase was renamed the Missouri Territory by Congress in June 1812. This sparked a debate in Washington as to whether the Missouri Territory would be free or slave. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward described it as, “The whole nation lies spread out like a gambler’s table”.

During the 1840s there was a push to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories as part of a plan to build a transcontinental railroad. The question of whether the rail line should pass through northern free territory or southern slave territory was hotly debated. It became clear that no progress on the railroad could be made unless the limits on slavery articulated in the Missouri Compromise could be removed. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas proposed a bill that offered residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories a choice as to whether they would permit or reject slavery on their soil. The fine details of the bill led Northerners and Southerners to find self interested reasons to deny its passage.

Moved by the immorality of slavery and angered by the Compromise of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When it was published as a two-volume work in 1852 it proved to be extremely popular in England. In May, 1853, during a visit to England, Stowe was presented with a petition signed by over a half million British women. This petition was titled, "An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters the Women of the United States of America.” The women of Britain hoped the petition would rouse women in the United States to the anti-slavery cause. In response, Stowe promised to establish a committee of women in America to generate support for abolition. The effort proved unsuccessful as Stowe had no strong connections to either established women's organizations or anti-slavery groups. However in March, 1854, Stowe published “An Appeal to the Women of the Free States of America on the Present Crisis in Our Country.” She urged women to petition, organize, and pray to prevent slavery in the nascent states of the Missouri Territory. (see reference below for this publication)

After much debate, The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by Congress on May 30, 1854, and signed by President Franklin Pierce. It divided the region along the 40th  parallel, with Kansas to the South and Nebraska to the North. It did allow people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´. President Pierce and Senator Douglas hoped that, “Popular Sovereignty” would help bring an end to the national debate over slavery, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act outraged many Northerners, giving rise to the anti-slavery Republican Party. After passage of the act, pro- and anti-slavery elements flooded into Kansas with the goal of establishing a population that would vote for or against slavery. The result was a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas".
 
Sources:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A life by Joan Hedrick published 1994 by Oxford University press
https://www.accessible-archives.com/2012/03/an-appeal-to-the-women-of-the-free-states-of-america/
 
https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/kansas.html
 
 About the author:
Dr. Nicholas Andreadis is a volunteer at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. He was a professor and dean at Western Michigan University prior to moving to Cincinnati.