September 2013 | Nate Pedersen

Harriet Beecher Stowe House Receives $150,000 for Collections Care

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The Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Hartford, Connecticut, which houses 200,000 manuscripts and 6,000 objects related to Stowe, will be the recipient of a $150,000 federal grant to help preserve its collections.

Stowe lived in the 5,000 sq foot home for the last 23 years of her life.  For many of those years, Stowe's next door neighbor was Mark Twain. 

Stowe also famously hid a fugitive slave at her Hartford home.  Research earlier this summer published in Common-Place, from the American Antiquarian Society, revealed the slave's name as John Andrew Jackson.  He escaped South Carolina in 1847 by stowing away on a north-bound ship in Charleston harbor. (The paper was written by Susanna Ashton a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina). 

The Harriet Beecher Stowe house is now a National Historic Landmark, freshly listed earlier this year. 

The $150,000 of federal funding will supplement $400,000 raised by the center already for buying and installing a new mechanical system, making climate and environmental control improvements, and installing a fire detection and protection system.

Visitors can tour the house most days.  Researchers can gain access to the extensive holdings of the research library by appointment.