Edgemont Inn - Harriet Beecher Stowe House

Reverse reads "Edgemont Inn, Cincinnati, Ohio." Located at 2950 Gilbert Avenue, at the corner of Foraker Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Edgemont Inn, formerly the Old Home Seminary, is now known as the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. The two story, gray painted brick home with wooden front porch was home to Harriet Beecher Stowe prior to her marriage, and to her father, Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, and his large family, a prolific group of religious leaders, educators, writers, and antislavery and women's rights advocates. The Beecher family includes Harriet's sister Catherine, an early female educator and writer who helped found numerous high schools and colleges for women; brother Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a leader of the women's suffrage movement and considered by some to be the most eloquent minister of his time; General James Beecher, a Civil War general who commanded the first African American troops in the Union Army recruited from the South; and sister Isabella Beecher Hooker, a women's rights advocate. The Beechers lived in Cincinnati for nearly 20 years, from 1832 to the early 1850s, before returning East. Shortly after leaving Cincinnati and basing her writing on her experiences in Cincinnati, in 1851-1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe authored the best-selling book of its time, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a fictionalized popular account of the pain slavery imposed on its victims and of the difficult struggles of slaves to escape and travel, on the Underground Railroad, to freedom in the northern states or Canada. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and is now a site of the Ohio History Connection.