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The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

Harriet Beecher Stowe forced people to think about the evil and immorality of slavery with the publication of her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Today, the Stowe Center in Hartford aims to keep people thinking.

Until the book shot up to the top of the bestseller list, abolitionists were considered radicals on the fringe of political beliefs.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Stowe, born in Litchfield, Conn., and her husband Calvin Ellis Stowe, from Natick, Mass., were ardent abolitionists. They supported the Underground Railroad. When Congress in 1850 passed the Fugitive Slave act, states had to help return escaped slaves to southern slave-owners. Officials who didn’t arrest suspected runaways were subject to fines, as were citizens helping the escapees. Special commissioners were empowered to police the law, and due process was eliminated for slaves captured in the North.

The act aimed to stop the flow of escaped slaves into Canada, a safe haven for slaves following the American Revolution. The British helped relocate slaves who fought for them in Canada rather than let them face re-enslavement after the war.

Harriet Beecher Stowe before she moved to Hartford.

The law only further stoked the anger of abolitionists, and it prompted Stowe to pick up her pen. She began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., where her husband taught. It started as a serial in a magazine, but soon John P. Jewett of Boston approached Stowe about publishing it as a book. Initially doubtful about its potential, Stowe nevertheless agreed to publication. Following its release on March 20, 1852, sales skyrocketed both in the U.S. and Britain.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the fringe issue of abolition into the mainstream. More than 300,000 copies of the book sold in its first year in the U.S., with even greater sales in Britain. After several years it went out of print. But it found a new audience during the Civil War, when the publisher reprinted it.

The story most often associated with the book today is that Abraham Lincoln, when introduced to Stowe in Washington, D.C., in 1862 said, “So this is the little lady who started this Great War.”

He probably didn’t say that, but the book unquestionably inflamed sentiment against slavery.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

Stowe spend the last 23 years of her life in the Nook Farm neighborhood of Hartford. She didn’t start out there, though. When her husband, the Rev. Calvin Stowe, resigned from teaching at Andover Theological Seminary supervised the construction of a mansion she called Oakholm.

Oakholm, however, got too expensive to maintain. In 1873, the Stowes moved to the 5,000-square-foot Victorian cottage at Nook Farm. There she wrote more books, supported the Wadsworth Athenaeum and worked to establish the Hartford Art School.

The Mark Twain House

She was at the end of her career, and a young upstart with the pen name of Mark Twain was building a fabulous house next door. The Clemens and Stowe families became friends as well as neighbors.

Stowe died in 1896 in her upstairs bedroom surrounded by family. The family sold the house, but her grandniece, Katharine Seymour Day, bought it back in 1924. Day also bought the Twain house and restored both. She bequeathed both to a foundation aimed at preserving Stowe’s legacy of work toward social justice.

Today, the Mark Twain House ranks as the Number One tourist attraction in Hartford. The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, unlike its neighbor, won’t wow visitors with its extravagant visitors. Rather, it aims to provoke thought and discussion of social justice in the context of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life and work.

Five Things You’ll Remember About the Stowe Center

Stowe lived here for 23 years.

Not your usual house museum.

The Stowe Center doesn’t focus on the contents of the house or historical facts; rather, the tour guides seek to provoke discussions about social justice. Some people find that approach unnecessarily political and offputting, while other love it.

The Kitchen

Harriet and her sister Catherine Beecher published a book in 1869 called The American Woman’s Home. It included their pioneering – and influential – ideas about kitchen design. The kitchen at the Stowe Center reflects those ideas: a coal stove at one end, a kitchen table in the center and shelves along the wall.

Period Furnishings

The house includes some original Victorian and late 18th century furniture owned by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It includes a mahagony drop-leaf table on which she wrote the beginnings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Don’t expect the Stowe Center guides to make a big deal about the furniture, though.

Artwork

Who knew? Harriet Beecher Stowe also painted in her spare time. Along the walls of the house are her paintings, many of which have religious subjects.

Messy desk

You would never mistake Harriet Beecher Stowe for a neatnik, and the Stowe Center has kept her original desk as messy as she died.

Nook Farm and the Stowe Center

The Stowe Center and the Twain house belong to the historic Nook Farm neighborhood in the Asylum Hill section on the western side of Hartford. The original developers divided up an old farm and sold parcels to friends and family. It evolved into a tight-knit community of reformers, authors and intellectuals.

Katharine Day House at Nook Farm

Some of the houses have been demolished, but some big old architecturally stylish houses survive. They include the Katharine Day House (a museum open to the public).

If you visit the Stowe Center…

Many people go to see the Mark Twain House and then visit the Stowe Center as an add-on. There is a small discount for visiting both houses.

Tours are required for the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center and are recommended in advance via their website. They run about 45 minutes and are intended to be participatory. You won’t have time to go back through the house on your own.

Ample parking is available near the house, though the house itself isn’t good for people with mobility issues.

There is a gift shop, but be forewarned: it has been described as a social justice library,

The Stowe Center opens to the public year-round, Wednesday through Saturdays. Hartford residents can get in free.

Images: Harriet Beecher Stowe House (featured) By Midnightdreary – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5846038; Unclo Tom’s Cabin book cover, By Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904), artist, binding designer. (Uploaded on Flickr by Boston Public Library) – Sarah Wyman Whitman Bindings, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38738126. By Sage Ross – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7722445. Harriet Beecher Stowe House By Todd Van Hoosear – originally posted to Flickr as Harriet Beecher Stowe Home, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11322573.

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The Mark Twain House: Part Steamboat, Part Medieval Fortress, Part Cuckoo Clock

Building the Mark Twain House was not an easy task for Samuel Clemens and his wife, Olivia. But when they moved into the quirky mansion with their children in 1874, they began the happiest years of their lives.

Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, in 1871

Clemens had fallen in love with Hartford and with his wife. Of Hartford, he said, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief… You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”

In 1873, he tried to beautify the city further by building a grand home for his family. One critic called the final product “part Mississippi steamboat, part medieval fortress, part cuckoo clock.” The family lived in it for 17 years, the happiest of his life. It was in that house that he wrote his most memorable works.

Genesis of the Mark Twain House

It all started in 1867 when Clemens, 31, took a five-month voyage to Europe and the Holy Land to write travel articles. He was then known as a journalist rather than a novelist. During the journey, he made friends with Charles Langdon.

Olivia Langdon Clemens at about 24

While visiting Langdon in his stateroom, Twain caught a glimpse of an ivory miniature of his older sister, Olivia. It was love at first sight. When they returned to America, he had dinner with the Langdon family in New York City, where they were staying for the Christmas holidays. On New Year’s Day Clemens called on Olivia and prolonged his visit beyond the socially acceptable 15 minutes – by 11 hours, 45 minutes.

Charles then invited him to visit with his family at their mansion in Elmira, N.Y., for a week. When he finally made it to Elmira in August, he stayed three weeks.

Clemens knew Olivia Langdon was much too good for him. She had wealth (coal money), education and social standing. He didn’t.

Her family liked him, but he wasn’t quite what they had in mind for their shy and gentle daughter. The devout Langdons didn’t touch alcohol. Clemens admitted he was “drunk oftener than was necessary & that I was wild & Godless, idle, lecherous & a discontented & unsettled rover.

He capitalized on his travel articles by turning to the lecture circuit, frequently finding excuses to visit Elmira. His fame as Mark Twain grew as his audiences swelled.

All the while he wrote Olivia – 180 letters, in fact. She sent him the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher. The tone of his letters grew meeker and more submissive. Finally, no doubt aware of his growing success, the Langdon family gave their approval to his marriage in 1870. Not only that, his father-in-law bought them a mansion with servants – in Buffalo.

Moving Out of Elmira

The newlyweds worked together on the manuscript of Innocents Abroad, a compilation of his travel articles. It was a monster hit, allowing him to quit his job as a Buffalo Express reporter. While visiting his publisher in Hartford, Clemens decided in 1873 he needed to move there. A dozen publishers operated out of the city, which attracted such prominent writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford

The Clemenses commissioned Edward Tuckerman Potter to design the three-story brick mansion in the Nook Farm neighborhood, essentially a writer’s colony. The property included a two-story carriage house and greenhouse. Twain wrote to his mother-in-law about his frustration with the building process:

I have been bullyragged all day by the builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified. Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I am a man who loathes details with all my heart.

The House

Nevertheless, great attention to detail went into the opulent, 11,500-square-foot house. It had high ceilings and massive amounts of carved wood. Clemens insisted on a window over the fireplace so he could see snowflakes meet the flames. He added a patch of tin to the roof so he could hear the rain drumming on it. Around the house he had rambling porches built like riverboat decks. And he had a massive carved mantle brought over from a Scottish castle installed in the library.

The house had modern conveniences available only to the upper crust: a bell system, central heating, lots of indoor plumbing, a burglar alarm, a shower and a telephone, hidden away in a telephone booth in the entryway.

Floor plan of the Mark Twain House. Courtesy Library of Congress.

No one seems to know quite what to call it: “Continental Picturesque,” “High Gothic” or just “Mississippi Steamboat.” Today the Mark Twain House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as “an asymmetrical polychromatic brick structures, with sweeping wood cornices and gables and flamboyant patterns of black and vermilion brick.”

The Good Life

The Clemenses moved into the house in September 1874 with their two daughters, Susy, a toddler, and Clara, an infant. Jean would follow in 1880.

The 17 years the family spent in the house were the happiest of Sam Clemens’ life. “”To us, our house was not unsentient matter — it had a heart, and a soul … It was of us, and we were in its confidence,” he wrote.

The window above the fireplace

The Godless, idle, lecherous rover turned into a devoted family man. Olivia home-schooled the children in the classroom, later hiring a governesses. Their father played with them in the conservatory and told them bedtime stories at night.

The family led a busy social life with the neighborhood influentials, hosting dinner parties, teas, charades and stag billiard nights. Guests included included the actor Edwin Booth, author Thomas Bailey Aldrich, political cartoonist Thomas Nast, explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Gen. William T. Sherman and writer Rudyard Kipling.

Where Tom Sawyer was born.

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived next door and often came over to play the piano.

The lavish living cost Clemens almost as much as he earned.

He earned quite a lot during his time in the Mark Twain House. He wrote his most notable fiction in his billiard room. Clemens sat at a desk facing the wall so the billiard table and the outdoors wouldn’t distract him. It worked; he wrote Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper and Life on the Mississippi.

That fireplace from Scotland

In 1881, the Clemenses hired Louis Comfort Tiffany to redecorate the mansion’s public rooms. Tiffany stenciled the elaborate entryway and painted patterns on the walls and ceiling in red, black and silver. His firm decorated the walls and ceilings with wallpaper and stencils. The result: “A circuit of the ground floor went from the Moorish front hall to a pink and silver drawing room evoking India to an Asian dining room and ended in a green and gold Persian library,” according to the Mark Twain House website.

Leaving the Mark Twain House

Clemens was as bad a businessman as he was good as a writer. He made some bad investments and in 1891 moved to Europe where the cost of living was cheaper. He lost more money in 1893 and went on the lecture circuit to earn it back. “The lack of money is the root of all evil,” he wrote.

Daughter Susy died suddenly of spinal meningitis in 1896, and the Clemenses couldn’t bear to return to the house. Olivia never set foot in it again. But they hung on to it until 1903, when he sold it for one-sixth the amount he’d put into it. It then became a library, an apartment house and a school. Finally the house was going to be torn down, but preservationists saved it in 1929.

The Mark Twain House is now a museum open to visitors. It has the only Louis Comfort Tiffany rooms outside of New York City.

If you go to the Mark Twain House:

The only way to see the house inside is to go on a guided tour. Visitors are advised to buy tickets in advance. A trip led by a re-enactor costs a few extra dollars and generally gets good reviews. There is also a modern, handicap-accessible museum wing which has a 23-minute film on Twain running continuously, a couple of exhibit spaces, a gift shop, a cafe and two parking lots.

351 Farmington Ave., Hartford.

Images: The Mark Twain House in Hartford by Ken Zirkel via Flickr, CC By-SA 3.0. Scottish fireplace By EGryk – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72993335

All other images courtesy Library of Congress.

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Charles Ives’ New England Holidays, A Danbury Childhood Set to Music

Charles Ives never forgot the sights and sounds of the village cornet band marching to the cemetery in Danbury, Conn., on Decoration Day. His father, George Ives, had served as a bandmaster in the Union Army and led the town bands after the Civil War.

Charles was born in 1874, soon enough after the war to understand the pain and loss the town still felt. He lived a typical life for a boy from a prominent old New England family. He starred on the baseball diamond, graduated from Yale, married, played the organ in church on Sunday and got rich on Wall Street.

But he led an unconventional life at night and on weekends. Charles Ives composed avant-garde orchestral music, much of which evoked the memories of his boyhood. He revived those early Decoration Days in the second movement of his symphony, New England Holidays, which also included Washington’s Birthday, Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

Charles ives

Ives’ colleagues knew him as a successful insurance man and were surprised to learn he composed music. No one performed his orchestral music until late in his life. He didn’t care; he wrote what he wanted to write without worrying what his listeners thought. His compositions had dissonance and complexity, wild noises and what conductor Michael Tilson Thomas called ‘confrontational crunches.’

Charles Ives’ Decoration Day

He worked on New England Holidays for years, even decades for the last movement, Thanksgiving.

The Danbury of Charles Ives’ youth.

Ives used hymns, folk songs, marching bands, country fiddlers, a blacksmith’s hammer, church bells and fireworks to paint a musical picture of perfect childhood days. In Decoration Day he evokes the overgrown lilacs in front of the homes abandoned by Civil War soldiers and the sounds of the cornet band. Ives explained what he was getting at with Decoration Day in a written preface to the musical score:

[1]In the early morning the gardens and woods about the village are the meeting places of those who, with tender memories and devoted hand, gather the flowers for the Day’s Memorial…

[2]After the Town Hall is filled with the spring’s harvest of lilacs, daisies and peonies, the parade s slowly formed on Main Street. First came the three Marshalls on Plough horses (going sideways); then the Warden and Burgesses in carriages, the Village Cornet Band, the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) two by two, the Militia…the inevitable swarm of small boys following.

[3] The march to Wooster Cemetery is a thing a boy never forgets. The roll of muffled drums and “Adeste Fidelis” answer for the dirge. A little girl on the fence post waves to her father and wonders if he looked like that at Gettysburg.

[4] After the last grave is decorated, “Taps” sound out through the pines and hickories, while a last hymn is sung.

[5] When the ranks are formed again and “We all march back to Town” to a Yankee stimulant–Reeves’ inspiring “Second Regiment Quick-Step” — though to many a soldier, the somber thoughts of the day, underlie the tunes of the band.

[6] The march stops — and in the silence, the shadow of the early morning flower-song rises over the Town and the sunset behind West Mountain breathes its benediction upon the Day.”

Charles Ives

Charles Ives was born to a prominent Danbury family on Oct. 20, 1874. His family home, built in 1780, held several generations of Iveses. George Ives, his father, helped found the Savings Bank of Danbury and the Danbury and Norwalk Railroad, now a branch of Metro-North’s New Haven Line.

Charles Ives, left, baseball star

Charles played drums in his father’s marching band in Danbury. George liked to experiment with music. He used to direct two bands to march toward each other playing different songs. He also made his son sing well-known songs while he played something different in a different key. Those experiments would appear later in the work of Charles Ives.

A Conventional Life

His father’s unconventional approach to music were perhaps the only indication Charles Ives would become a path-breaking composer of music. His life did not defy convention.

He composed Symphony No. 1 for his senior thesis at Yale, but his advisor’s reaction convinced him he couldn’t make a living writing the kind of music he wanted to. So he went to work for an insurance company, and eventually founded a successful insurance agency. In 1908, he married Harmony Twichell, whose father had a close friendship with Mark Twain.

Young Charles Ives

His choice of a wife with the first name Harmony seems especially apt. So is the fact that she presided as president of the Mark Twain Society. Ives championed ordinary people over elites in his music, in his memory and in his politics.

He once proposed a Constitutional amendment that would allow citizens to propose bills in Congress. Each year, Congress would pick 10 proposals and put them to a national ballot referendum. Ives printed a pamphlet about the plan and sent it to the 1920 Republican National Convention, but it arrived too late.

By then, Charles Ives had already had his first heart attack during World War I. An argument with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, triggered the attack. Ives had suggested financing the war effort with war bonds as low as $50. Roosevelt “scorned the idea of anything so useless as a $50 bond,” but later came around to the idea.

Musical Legacy

He bought a camp in Redding, Conn., which he eventually expanded into a home and studio. There he could retreat for the weekends composing his music, which he didn’t expect to be played in public.

Ives composed prolifically, especially from 1907-1918. Then one day in 1927 he came downstairs with tears in his eyes and told Harmony he couldn’t write music anymore. “It just doesn’t sound right,” he told her. He continued to revise his music, however. He worked on Thanksgiving, the final movement of New England Holidays, for 30 years.

Ives also secretly financed the careers of up-and-coming composers as Lou Harrison and Nicolas Slonimsky. In 1931 and 1932, Slominsky conducted the first three movements of New England Holidays.

In 1947, Charles Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting. He didn’t care, calling prizes ‘badges of mediocrity.’ He gave away his prize money, saying, “Prizes are for boys and I’m a grown-up person.”

Leonard Bernstein, who called Ives the greatest American composer, premiered Ives’ Symphony No. 2 in 1951. Ives heard it over the radio.

Charles Ives’ boyhood home

Ives moved around, but often returned to his family home for gatherings. As Danbury grew from a town to a city, commercial buildings and their clutter grew around the Ives house. The Danbury Museum and Historical Society now owns the house, which it is trying to restore as a museum.

Charles Ives died on May 19, 1954.

To see a documentary about Charles Ives and New England Holidays, click here. With thanks to Music of the First World War by Don Tyler

Album cover of Charles Ives, CC by 2.0. Charles Ives’ house By Daniel Case – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11377562. This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Places Where a Revolutionary Hero Lived

You didn’t have to show courage in battle to be a revolutionary hero. But if you were, it probably took more than a century for historians and builders to restore your house and turn it into a museum.

Benjamin Edes and his partner, John Gill, did more to stir up revolutionary fervor in the American colonies than any other publisher. On the night of Dec. 16, 1771, Sons of Liberty secretly assembled at Edes’ home in Boston. They disguised themselves as Indians and walked down to the wharves. There a crowd gathered while they chopped open the tea chests on three ships and dumped all the tea into the harbor.

Today, you can visit Benjamin Edes’ old print shop, next to the Old North Church on the Freedom Trail.

Every New England state has a home or an office belonging to a hero of the American Revolution. Here are six of them, one for each state. All but one existed in obscurity for more than a century, their association with a revolutionary hero forgotten. The colonial revival stimulated interest in the old buildings, and historians transformed them into museums.

Nathan Hale Homestead

The Nathan Hale Homestead, which memorializes Connecticut’s most cherished revolutionary hero, in Coventry, Conn.

Every schoolchild knows the story of Nathan Hale, the young schoolmaster turned spy for George Washington. The famous Indian fighter Robert Rogers captured him on Long Island, and the British hanged him without a trial. The State of Connecticut considers him a revolutionary hero for his defiant last words, “I only regret that I have but one life to live for my country.”

When the Hale family hadn’t heard from Nathan in a while, his brother went to Old Saybrook, Conn., to track him down. He learned Nathan was killed and was given a trunk of his belongings.

The Hale family eventually sold the house and it passed through several hands. Then a Connecticut lawyer named George Dudley Seymour got caught up in the Nathan Hale story. He found out the house, sadly in need of repair, was for sale. Seymour bought it, restored it and filled it with Connecticut antiques, including Nathan’s trunk.

Nathan Hale never lived in the Nathan Hale Homestead, but he did live in a house on the same location. His family tore it down during the war to build the bigger house, which survived.

The Hale Homestead grounds are open year round from dawn to dusk, and the house itself is open for tours from May to October.

2299 South St., Coventry, Conn.

Wadsworth-Longfellow House

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House, home to a revolutionary hero and a poet.

Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, served in the Continental Army as a brigadier general. His greatest moment in the war came during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. As British warships drove American forces up the Penobscot River, Wadsworth saved his men by leading a retreat by land back to Boston.

The British later captured Wadsworth from his headquarters in Thomaston, Maine, and confined him at Fort George in Castine, Maine. He escaped by cutting a hole in the ceiling and crawling along the joists.

Wadsworth went home to Plymouth, Mass., but he returned to Maine and bought property in what is now Portland. He built the first brick house in the city, now known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. His son and wife lived in the house, where they raised their children.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s sister owned the house until her death in 1901, when she bequeathed it to the Maine Historical Society. The historical society runs it as a house museum – Maine’s first, as a matter of fact. It’s open May through October.

489 Congress St., Portland, Maine

Printing Office of Edes & Gill

Where Benjamin Edes published the Boston Gazette.

Benjamin Edes, along with his partner John Gill, didn’t fight in the war, but he was nonetheless a revolutionary hero. Edes, more than any other publisher, stoked public indignation over Parliament’s abuse of the American colonies.

Edes and Gill worked out of a print shop in Boston’s North End, near Paul Revere’s house and next to the Old North Church. The Old North Church now owns the building where Edes and Gill ran their printing press.

Edes escaped Boston during the siege and moved to Watertown, Mass., where he continued to publish the Boston Gazette until 1798. The British arrested his 17-year-old son Peter for 3-1/2 months, mostly because they hated his father.

The North End went from a fashionable neighborhood to a slum, then back to fashionable.The Printing Office of Edes & Gill opened as a museum in 2011. Interpreters show how colonial printers worked their trade on the museum’s historic equipment. They also explain how Boston’s patriot press incited the American colonies to rebellion.

21 Unity St., Boston, Mass.

Gen. John Stark House

The home of Indian fighter and revolutionary hero John Stark in Manchester, N.H.

Gen. John Stark gave New Hampshire its motto, which you’ve no doubt seen on its license plates: Live Free or Die.

The old Indian fighter marched his New Hampshire militia to Boston as soon as he heard about the Battles of Lexington and Concord. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, he led his men to a spot where he anticipated the British would attack. He may or may not have said, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Someone did; it just isn’t clear who.

He was an unsung revolutionary hero of the Battle of Saratoga, where he and his men prevented the British from retreating north. His heroics at the Battle of Bennington are more widely remembered. Even today, many New Hampshirites can quote him: “There they are boys! We beat them today or Molly Stark sleeps a widow tonight!”

Stark famously went home to his farm in Derryfield (now Manchester) after the war and died at age 93. The Stark family sold his boyhood home in 1821, and then the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company bought it in 1835 to use as worker housing. In 1937, the company gave the building to the Daughters of the American Revolution, who restored it. They moved it to the original Stark farm in 1968 and turned it into a house museum.

2000 Elm St., Manchester, N.H.

Nathanael Greene Homestead

The home of Nathanael Greene, revolutionary hero.

Nathanael Greene had asthma, walked with a pronounced limp and belonged to the pacifist Quaker religion.

None of that stopped him from becoming a revolutionary hero doing some of the toughest jobs of the war for independence.

When Americans despaired of ever evicting the British, Nathanael Greene lured Gen. Cornwallis away from his supply lines and into battles that inflicted heavy casualties. Greene took control of most of the South away from British forces and returned to his home in Rhode Island.

Nathanael Greene built the house in 1770, and his family lived there through the war. Greene moved his family to Newport at the war’s end in 1783, but then relocated to Georgia and died soon thereafter.

He had sold the Coventry house to his brother Jacob, and it remained in the Greene family until 1899. The family, though, rented it as a tenement house and neglected to keep it up.

In 1919, the Nathanael Greene Homestead Association formed to restore the former home of Rhode Island’s best known revolutionary hero. Today it’s a house museum, and part of the Anthony Village Historic District. Open for tours from April through October.

20 Taft St., Coventry, R.I.

Ethan Allen Homestead Museum

The Ethan Allen Homestead, home of Vermont’s greatest revolutionary hero.

Ethan Allen could claim stature as a revolutionary hero for capturing Fort Ticonderoga with Benedict Arnold in 1775. But he spent most of the war imprisoned by the British and then, after his release, ferreting out Loyalists in Vermont.

He spent the years after his imprisonment pursuing politics, writing books and speculating in land. He and his family moved to a new house overlooking the Winooski River in Burlington in 1787, but he only lived there until his death in 1789. His survivors sold the house, which passed through several hands. Local people always knew the house had belonged to Ethan Allen, but no one did much about it until a Burlington resident named William J. Van Patten bought it in 1902.

Van Patten donated 12 acres of the property to the Sons of the American Revolution on condition they maintain it as a park and build a tower to Vermont’s revolutionary hero. They did, and Van Patten lived in the house and ran the rest of the property as a dairy farm.

In the late 1980s, a surviving remnant of the farm was turned into The Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. It now functions as a house museum with living history events and lectures on Vermont’s history. Open May through October.

1 Ethan Allen Homestead, Burlington, Vt.

Images: By Sphilbrick – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11802250; Clough House By MLHalsey – Own work,CC BY-SA 3.0,, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23197901; Gen. John Stark House By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19357747; Nathanael Greene Homestead By Camanda at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18112163; Ethan Allen Homestead By Mfwills; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:11, 24 October 2013 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29160603

This story was updated in 2024.

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