The slave cabin that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” will be preserved thanks to Maryland officials who agreed on Thursday to buy it for $1 million.
In the early 19th century, the gray log cabin was home to Josiah Henson, a slave Stowe used as a model for the Uncle Tom character in her novel, a global bestseller that ignited abolitionist fervor in the United States before the Civil War.
Montgomery County’s planning board voted unanimously to buy a one-acre property in the heart of one of the Washington area’s hottest real estate markets. The parcel includes both the cabin and an attached 18th century house.
The little cabin and attached house that were once part of Isaac Riley’s 3,700-acre tobacco plantation now sit behind a fringe of trees on a busy suburban thoroughfare a few miles from the Washington Beltway. The simple cabin’s interior has the original stone hearth although the dirt floor has been replaced by wood.
Stowe’s Uncle Tom was a long-suffering, dutiful servant to his white masters — a portrayal so vivid that even 154 years on, the name is synonymous with a black person who is submissive to white authority figures.
Far from fitting that description, Henson, who was born in Maryland in 1789, used his strength and determination to try to buy his freedom.
Underground railroad
When Riley reneged on that transaction, Henson and his family escaped to Canada in 1830 via the Underground Railroad, a network of routes and safe houses that helped slaves escape to free states.
In Ontario, Henson became a preacher and founded Dawn, a settlement for escaped slaves with a school to upgrade their skills. His 1849 memoir is largely credited with inspiring Stowe, who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” largely in Brunswick, Maine.
When President Abraham Lincoln met Beecher Stowe in 1862, he is reported to have remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared free all slaves in rebelling Confederate territory.
In “The Life of Josiah Henson,” the former slave describes his first sight of the cabin as “a crowded room with its earth floor, its filth and stench.”
‘Accursed spot’
“Full of gloomy reflections at my loneliness and the poverty-stricken aspect of the whole farm, I sat down, thinking how I could escape from the accursed spot,” Henson wrote.
Henson’s former home, which has not been put on the National Register of Historic Places, had been owned for the past 40 years by the Mallet-Prevost family.
Hildegarde Mallet-Prevost died in September at age 100, and her family put the property up for sale, sparking fears in the community that the historic buildings could have been turned into a commercial property or renovated into one of the luxury homes popular in the area.
Hildegarde’s son Greg Mallet-Prevost said the heirs had achieved their most important goal — to sell the property to a public entity that would allow the cabin “to tell its story.”
Montgomery County Planning Board spokeswoman Marion Joyce said the county intends to open the property to the public and hopes to hold a transaction closing ceremony on Jan. 16, the Martin Luther King Day holiday.