Harriet Beecher Stowe House

The house at 63 Federal Street in Brunswick is where the most consequential American novel was drafted. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in the rented 1807 Titcomb house from 1850 to 1852 — husband Calvin teaching at Bowdoin, six children underfoot, a small school run with her sister Catharine in the crowded rooms — and there wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the serial that became the book Lincoln allegedly credited with starting the war.

The novel had a Brunswick origin scene: in November 1850, Stowe sheltered John Andrew Jackson, a fugitive from South Carolina, for a night at the house — an encounter she later said proved formative. As the chapters went to the National Era in Washington, she read them aloud on Saturday evenings to family and Bowdoin students — among them a young Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who would carry the book's cause to Little Round Top.

The Stowes left for Andover in 1852, the year the book appeared — an international sensation translated into twenty-three languages and, in the South, grounds for violent hatred of its author. The house itself was remade after her time — the 1855 renovation gave it the Greek Revival exterior — but the rooms where she wrote and read the chapters survive, now a National Historic Landmark and a Network to Freedom site kept by Bowdoin College.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is the archive's novel file — the Brunswick house where Uncle Tom's Cabin was drafted between the children and the school, a fugitive sheltered under its roof, chapters read aloud before they changed the country.