Historic house in the shadows

Sunday, February 14, 1999

Historic house in the shadows

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Gilbert Avenue residence kept off tourist track by lack of funding

Harriet Beech Stowe house
(Tony Jones photos)
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The old Walnut Hills house was declared a “white elephant” by Cincinnati City Councilman Charles P. Taft in 1974.

Furthermore, Mr. Taft said, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House was misnamed. It was not the home of the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin;it was the home of her father, Lyman Beecher. Mr. Taft said she lived there only 10 months — and not while she wrote her famous book.

“The state's trying to get rid of a white elephant on us,” the councilman said, and he blocked a motion to take over the house from the Ohio Historical Society.

IF YOU GO

• What: The Harriet Beecher Stowe House.
• When: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday.
• Where: 2950 Gilbert Ave., Walnut Hills.
• Admission: Free, but donations are appreciated.
• Information: 632-5120.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is the last surviving building from the 1830s in its area along Gilbert Avenue, a main Underground Railroad route. .

“The house is important. The whole neighborhood is important,” says Carl Westmoreland, external affairs adviser for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Unlike the two Taft homes in Cincinnati, the William Howard Taft Birthplace in Mount Auburn and the Taft Museum downtown, the Stowe house is not a museum, filled with period furniture. It's a community and educational center.

Old furnishings and historical documents decorate the front hall.
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The Ohio Historical Society still owns the building, but it's operated by the Citizens Committee on Youth (CCY), Cincinnati's contract agency for youth services.

The historical society is responsible for major maintenance and capital improvements. The CCY pays for upkeep and personnel.

“If you don't have constant maintenance for an old house like this, it tends to deteriorate,” says Emma Cox, Stowe house director.

Rooms on the second floor don't have window shades. Computers in the classrooms can't run any current programs or link to the Internet. The attic is filled waist high with broken computers under a ceiling of crumbling plaster.

The house needs a library and bookstore, Miss Cox adds. And storage. “People want to donate historic items to us, but we have no place to put them. The basement and the attic need to be fixed up so we can use them for storage.”

Anti-slavery hotbed
The house was built for Lyman Beecher when he was appointed president of the Lane Theological Institute in 1832.

“It was her father's home,” Miss Cox says. “All the Beechers lived here.” (Councilman Taft, however, was incorrect; Harriet lived in the house for almost five years.)

This desk is the only furniture owned by the Beecher family remaining in the Walnut Hills house.
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“The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati is more than a house where she lived,” Mr. Westmoreland points out. “It is important as a significant site in the abolitionist movement.”

The Lane Seminary had a national reputation as a center for anti-slavery activists. There are numerous accounts of fugitives Harriet and Calvin Stowe helped in their home, which stood on the site of the Assumption Church at William Howard Taft Road and Gilbert Avenue. Underground Railroad leader Levi Coffin, a friend of the Stowes, lived in a house at 3131 Wehrman Ave., a few hundred yards from the Stowe house.

Lane Seminary students visited African-American homes in the city and taught classes in the homes. Fugitives fleeing to the hilltops from the city basin would have sought help at and near the seminary.

The area along Gilbert Avenue, a road made of fence rails that Harriet called an “Ohio rail-road,” was the route to the Shaker communities near Lebanon, the next stop on the road to Canada and freedom.

Maintenance efforts
Efforts to preserve the house began in the 1920s. In 1943, it was purchased by a citizens group, which turned it over to the Ohio Historical Society in 1946. In the 1970s, CCY students refurbished the house.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1970, it opened to the public in 1979. The first floor serves as a community center; CCY uses the second floor as an educational resource center with classrooms to train clients for GED tests.

“The building was settling a few years ago, and we got money from the Ohio Historical Society and from the city of Cincinnati to reinforce the foundation. The historical society paid for a new roof, but we are responsible for upkeep, such as lawn mowing,” says CCY director Clarence Williams III.

The in-between tasks, such as cleaning clogged gutters can be “a chess match between the two,” custodian Nathaniel Williams says.

Only a few antique chairs are in the two public rooms, along with a desk that belonged to the Beecher family.

“We had a chair that belonged to Robert E. Lee,” Miss Cox says, “but the Ohio Historical Society took it away.

“But we don't want this to be a place where you can't touch anything. We have programs and exhibitions about slavery and the African-American experience. This is a community center and we think that's how Mrs. Stowe would have wanted it to be used.”

No budget for programs
The house is now probably the city's most visible symbol of the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad, yet it gets no state funding for programming. Any projects, programs or exhibitions are put together by Miss Cox, without staff or budget.

Occasionally, people will make a donation when they visit the house, but no fund-raising campaigns have been held to establish an operating fund.

“We are currently looking into some kind of relationship with the Underground Railroad Freedom Center,” Clarence Williams says.

“When the big museum (the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center) gets on the riverfront, it's a given that people will come up here to see this house,” Miss Cox says. “Even now we get visitors from Germany, China, from all over the world. There's a lot that we could be doing that we can't afford to do.”

Additions to house
Although Lyman Beecher preached against slavery, “it is doubtful that fugitives from slavery were hidden in the Harriet Beecher Stowe House during the Beecher residence,” Miss Cox says.

“When the Beecher family lived here, it was much smaller, just the front part, two rooms up and two down. The stories of hiding slaves in the basement can't be true because there is no basement under the part of the house that was here at the time.”

Neighborhood folklore tells of a tunnel from the seminary into the cellar of the Stowe House, but Miss Cox doubts the story.

“I can see no evidence of a tunnel. There may have been slaves hidden here after the house was sold to the Montfort family. They built a new wing that has a basement under it.”

Harriet Beecher lived in the house from 1832 until her marriage to Calvin Stowe in 1836, when the newlyweds moved to another house on the Lane campus.

She moved back for 10 months in 1836 and 1837 while her husband, a teacher at the seminary, traveled in Europe, gathering a library for the school. Living only a block away, she was a frequent visitor to her father's home until she and her family moved to Maine in 1850.

“She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (published in 1852) after she left Cincinnati,” Miss Cox says, “but the book was based on events she witnessed and heard about during the 18 years she lived in Cincinnati.”

Harriet wasn't the only famous Beecher. Her father, who had 13 children by three wives, was a famous clergyman and educator. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was a leading preacher and orator who fought for women's suffrage and the emancipation of slaves. Her sister Catherine was an important reformer and educator who operated the Western Female Seminary in Cincinnati.

“There were still people living here on the second floor when I first came here in 1950,” Miss Cox says. “If you knocked on the door, they would let you come in and look around.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe “wasn't just somebody who wrote a book,” Mr. Westmoreland says. “She was an anti-slavery activist and an activist for minority rights and women's rights. She helped a number of African-American authors get their books published.”

This is the second in a monthly series, focusing on threatened remnants of Tristate history.



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