Stowe House connects two past eras with today

I love a good historical house tour, and I’ve taken walks through famous people’s houses more times than I can remember. Often they are furnished carefully in the style of a time period, with a sort of reverence for the objects the famous person touched.  

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Walnut Hills aims for something different. 

“The house itself is the artifact,” Abigail Zhang, the nonprofit’s communications director, told me while giving me a tour. 

The museum is more about context, relevance to the present and the ideals that took root here. While the architecture, the wallpaper, the rugs are all accurate to the two eras it commemorates (as the 19th century Stowe family residence and much later as a Green Book location), you will not be looking reverently at the desk in a room where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” 

For one thing, she didn’t actually write it there. 

Harriet Beecher came to Southwest Ohio with her family in 1832 when her father Lyman Beecher was named the president of Lane Seminary, also in Walnut Hills. Soon, the seminary was embroiled in important debates about slavery, the Lane Seminary debates, which Harriet attended. She married Calvin Stowe in the house, and while  in Cincinnati, she had experiences with slavery, slave owners and enslaved people. These were the materials she drew upon later to write the novel that personalized the evils of that institution and helped spark the war that brought it to an end. 

There’s lots of information about Harriet, early Cincinnati and the debates. But the excellent thing about the house now is the form it has taken since its 2024 renovation. It includes the house’s subsequent use as a boarding house and tavern that served the diverse Walnut Hills population. 

A visit now connects two points in time. You start with the 1830s, when the Lane debates were partly about whether free Black people would be able to take care of themselves. (James Bradley, the only formerly enslaved person there, said, “They have to take care of, and support themselves now, and their master, and his family into the bargain; and this being so, it would be strange if they could not provide for themselves, when disencumbered from this load,” according to the Walnut Hills Historical Society.) 

Then you come to the 1940s, when Black people who lived in the house were taking care of themselves and their community just fine, despite all the obstacles thrown in their way. 

The Edgemont Inn housed 19 lodgers in 1940, most of whom had arrived from the South. Proprietor Irene Bacon gave them a respectable place to stay and introductions to others in the community. The inn was later listed in the Green Book, the important guide for Black people traveling during the time of segregation. And it was a gathering place for the local Black community. 

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the National Association of College Women, the Cincinnati Medical Association and Ohio Valley Dental Society, all African American groups, met here, as did the Ninth Ward Negro Republicans and other political groups.

 To really experience the museum, come to one of its events, which are inspired by the house and the visionaries who occupied it. They recreate the hospitality and community of the Edgemont.

“One of my favorite events here is open mic night,” said Zhang, who has been at the Stowe House since 2018. People come read their poetry. We have poets from 10 years to 65 years. It embodies community, and it’s all off-line – it’s for whoever’s in the room.”

There’s a book club called the Semi-Colon club, after a club Harriet belonged to. There are art exhibits and neighborhood walking tours. You can volunteer to help with the garden, a recent project with University of Cincinnati that draws on the plants and gardening practices from the house’s different eras. 

Zhang says she hopes Stowe’s impulse to do what she could is a central message. “Harriet never voted because she couldn’t,” said Zhang. But she could write. She wrote to help support her family for many years.

“I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity, because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath,” Stowe wrote to Lord Thomas Denman in 1853.

The museum also honors the spirit of those who founded Harriet Beecher Stowe House Memorial Association, and raised money to preserve the building in 1943. They were led by George W.B. Conrad, a local Black lawyer and community leader who said, “Our predominant desire is that this home may prove a sacred, historic place, where in the lofty and eminent  principles and virtues of Peace, Justice and Good-will shall ever abide.” 

Places have power. Stowe’s family’s house makes me feel the short distance between us in time – and in the work toward those goals that has been accomplished but that has not yet been finished.

stowehousecincy.org

Polly Campbell covered restaurants and food for the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1996 until 2020. She writes monthly on a variety of topics, and she welcomes your feedback and column suggestions at editor (at) moversmakers.org