This house bears witness to generations joining their voices for truth in the nation’s struggle toward freedom and humanity for all.
Visitors will encounter the history 2950 Gilbert Avenue witnessed in two different time periods 100 years apart:
Average visit time: Allow 1+ hours
The years Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the widely acclaimed and influential 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, spent in Cincinnati were pivotal. Her observations and experiences in that city and nearby Kentucky, a slave state, inspired the novel that transformed the country.
100 years later as the Edgemont Inn listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, the house continued to be a place of gathering and community.
The house is a recognized site on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. While in the Cincinnati area, learn more about freedom seekers and the Underground Railroad by visiting the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center; the Ohio History Connection’s John Rankin House in Ripley; and the John Parker House in Ripley.
This house was home to Harriet Beecher before her marriage to Calvin Stowe in 1836, and to her father, Rev. 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 Beecher, an early 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; Gen. 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 wrote the best-selling book of its time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a fictionalized account of the pain slavery imposed on its victims and of the difficult struggles of slaves to escape and travel via the Underground Railroad to freedom in the northern states or Canada. Published just after the fugitive slave laws were enacted by Congress in 1850, the book made Harriet Beecher Stowe a household name. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been published in over 75 languages and is still an important text used in schools all over the world.
100 years later, the Walnut Hills neighborhood around the house was a thriving African American business district. The House itself had become a boarding house and tavern—home to 19 residents largely new to Cincinnati as part of the Great Migration.
The Negro Green Motorist Book was developed by Victor Hugo Green and his wife Alma in 1936 for African American motorists. Discrimination against African Americans meant that black motorists had trouble finding safe housing, restaurants, rest stops, and other accommodations throughout the North as well as the South. The Negro Motorist Green Book listed companies and organization that served and were safe for African Americans. It originally published safe havens in NYC, but then expanded to include all of North America.
In the 1940 edition of the Green Book, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, then referred to as “The Edgemont Inn,” was one of only a few taverns listed as safe for African Americans in Cincinnati. Other Walnut Hills neighborhood businesses were also included as restaurants, hotels, and beauty parlors. The Edgemont Inn, overseen by proprietor Irene Bacon, was listed in every edition from 1939 through the 1940s.
The full interior and exterior restoration of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House that concluded in 2024 features sections restored to both 1840 and 1940, in order to highlight the house’s two official periods of significance.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is managed locally by the Friends of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, Inc.
The site is also an American Writers Museum affiliate.
