Stowe’s Hartford Home A Story of the Ages and the Usefulness of History
/By Briann Greenfield and Beth Burgess for Connecticut Explored
The Gothic Revival-style house on Forest Street in Hartford that Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in and enjoyed from 1873 to her death in 1896 has meant many different things in its time as a historic artifact. Distinct, though not mutually exclusive, these assorted meanings point to the usefulness of history.
Perhaps the first person to grapple with the meaning of the house was Stowe’s grandniece, Katharine Seymour Day (1870-1964). Day, a professionally-trained artist and an activist in reform movements of the Progressive era, purchased the house in 1924 with the intention to restore it to the period of her great-aunt’s residency. Her goal was personal, at least at first: to commemorate her prominent early Connecticut family.
Day lived in the house as she assembled a substantial collection of family papers, household furnishings, and memorabilia associated with her famous aunt. In 1941 Day incorporated the site as a foundation, and, by subsequently providing for it in her will, established the organization that exists today.
In many ways, it is remarkable that she preserved a place associated with abolition at the time she did. Nationally, the 1920s was an era of heightened racism marked by the erosion of civil rights gained during Reconstruction, anti-black violence, lynchings, and legal racial discrimination. Three years before Day purchased the house, Charles S. Johnson, a prominent African American sociologist, reported on conditions among Black residents in Hartford, recording the impact of housing segregation and employment discrimination.
Johnson paid considerable attention to the changing demographics in Hartford’s Black community caused by the tobacco industry’s recruitment of Black families from Georgia to work in the fields. He recognized that these new migrants, conspicuous because of their rural customs and manners, were entering a social order hardened against newcomers after decades of Eastern European immigration. Indeed, in 1922 and 1924, as Herbert F. Janick Jr. writes in A Diverse People: Connecticut 1914 to the Present (Pequot Press, 1975), the Ku Klux Klan staged a series of open rallies in Connecticut.
The degree to which Day recognized the relevance of her great-aunt’s anti-slavery work to these political and cultural debates is not clear. Over time the work of preservation and collecting provided Day with additional opportunities to explore her personal past. She acquired a 17th century foot warmer owned by her Hooker ancestors, a Queen Anne-style highboy evocative of the Connecticut River Valley, and the Andrew Kingsbury Collection of 18th-century Connecticut legal documents. When it came time to incorporate her foundation, Day chose a name that expressed her family focus: the Stowe-Beecher-Hooker-Seymour-Day Memorial Library and Historical Foundation.
Day’s family history, though, didn’t provide a lasting interpretive frame. Seminal in shaping the next vision was Joseph Van Why. Van Why arrived in 1955 to work as Day’s private cataloger. As he recounted for a 1992 newsletter, his Dutch, English, and French Huguenot pedigree helped get him the job. Learning the cataloging and curatorship job skills required would come later.
With Day’s death in 1964, Van Why became the foundation’s curator, rising to the position of executive director in 1969, a role he held for 23 years until his retirement in 1992. During those years, Van Why conducted the first primary-source research and collaborated on the Stowe house restoration with first director Bill Warren, who led the organization from 1965 to 1969.
He also oversaw interpretation, processed more than 200,000 manuscript items, the majority related to Stowe, her extended family, and neighboring residents of Nook Farm, and built a modern underground archives facility to hold them all. Those projects focused Van Why, who also served briefly and concurrently as executive director of the Mark Twain House from 1970 to 1974, on the Victorian period in a way that Day had not.
“Every generation understands Stowe’s story in new ways, and this is especially true as we enter a period of heightened racial justice activism.”
The project to open the house to the public, as it did in 1968, meant identifying appropriate period furnishings, searching for period wallpapers, and assembling multiple sets of period china for the construction of seasonal displays. The archival work gave Van Why intimate knowledge of everyday life at Nook Farm. It may be surprising that the Stowe House was one of the first Victorian house museums in the country. Victorian decorative arts and architecture was just gaining acceptance as worthy of preservation in the 1950s and 1960s. Carl W. Drepperd’s 1950 collecting manual, Victorian, The Cinderella of Antiques (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co.), makes this fact evident, damning Victorian furnishings with faint praise and promising to distinguish between the “premium” and more prevalent “junk.”
Van Why’s embrace of the Victorian era coincided with a perceived period of decline in Hartford. The 1960s was a period of suburbanization, white flight, and corporate exodus. In a sense, a turn to the Victorian past could function as an escapist nostalgia for a time when the city could boast industrial wealth and nationally prominent citizens like Stowe and Twain.
But the elevation of Hartford’s Victorian past could also be read as a defense of the urban environment, a la Jane Jacobs, the prominent urbanist and activist, who rejected urban renewal and so-called “slum clearance,” arguing that dense urban neighborhoods built in the late-Victorian period strengthened social networks and community life. Van Why quietly supported Hartford cultural leaders, including those at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Mark Twain House, who sought to promote Victorian Hartford as a heritage tourism destination and with it a source of revenue for city businesses.
Every generation understands Stowe’s story in new ways, and this is especially true as we enter a period of heightened racial justice activism. The end of slavery was not the end of racial oppression, and the years between the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 and Stowe’s death in 1896 can tell us a lot about how racism has persisted and thrived. In bridging the Victorian and early modern period with its popularity, Uncle Tom’s Cabin both carried forward old forms of racism and created new forms. Stowe opposed slavery using a form of Victorian sentimental fiction that encouraged feelings—calling on her white readers to open their hearts and feel the plight of enslaved men and women. Stowe also based her claim for the humanity of enslaved men and women on their ability to feel, to bring Christ into their hearts, and to practice morality.
Briann Greenfield was executive director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center from 2018 to 2021. Beth Burgess is Director of Collections & Research. This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Connecticut Explored, the magazine and podcast of Connecticut history, and appears here with permission. For an introductory free copy of the current print issue of Connecticut Explored, go to https://www.ctexplored.org/shop. Or check out the free e-newsletter at https://ctexplored.substack.com
