Abolitionism

Thomas Hart Hooker House (1770)

The Thomas Hart Hooker House, on Main Street in Farmington, was built in 1770 by Judah Woodruff for Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker and of Stephen Hart, one of the founders of Farmington. Hooker had married Sarah Whitman Hooker in 1769 and in 1773 they moved to what is now West Hartford. The house was later owned by Samuel Deming, an abolitionist who used his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Deming also joined with Austin Williams and John Treadwell Norton in bringing the Africans from the Amistad to Farmington in 1841. The house, now owned by Miss Porter’s School, is on the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

United Church on the Green (1815)

United Church on the Green, located on New Haven Green just northeast of First Church, was built 1812-1815. The Congregation dates back to the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In 1796, two congregations united: the White Haven church (formed in 1742) and the Fair Haven church (formed 1769). Their church building, originally known as North Church, was designed by Ebenezer Johnson, a member of the church committee, who made reference to the design of All Saints Church in Southampton, England (designed by C. L. Stieglitz; built 1792-5; destroyed 1940) as featured in a French architectural book. North Church was built by the noted Connecticut architect, David Hoadley. In 1849, the interior was totally remodeled by Sidney Mason Stone. In 1884, North Church joined with Third Church to form United Church. Both congregations had been involved with abolitionism: Third Church’s Simeon Jocelyn was a founding member of the Amistad Committee and North Church’s Roger Sherman Baldwin was a lawyer who defended the Amistad African’s rights.

Edward Hooker House (1811)

On High Street in Farmington is an 1811 Federal-style house built for Edward Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker (Hartford’s first minister) and Samuel Hooker (Farmington’s second minister). Edward Hooker was a farmer and operated a small preparatory school for boys, called the “Old Red College,” in his parents old farmhouse in Farmington. He closed the school in 1816, when the town was planning to open its own academy in the village center. Deacon Edward Hooker’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Francis Gillette, a future senator. The house was inherited, after Edward Hooker’s death in 1846, by his son, John Hooker, a lawyer, who in 1841 had married Isabella Beecher Hooker, the younger half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The couple lived in Farmington until they moved to Hartford in the early 1850s, establishing the neighborhood of Nook Farm together with the Gillettes. The Farmington house remained in the Hooker family until it was sold in 1864.

John Hooker was an abolitionist. On Mill Lane in Farmington is Deming’s Store, where Hooker rented an office, next to a room used by the Africans from the Amistad during their stay in Farmington. John Hooker also helped the Rev. James Pennington, a former slave in Maryland who had escaped to Connecticut, attended Yale and become a Congregational minister. After the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, African-Americans living in the North who were still regarded as slaves in the southern states were in great danger. In 1851, Hooker legally purchased Pennington’s freedom from slavery from the estate of his former owner. Pennington wrote a book about his experiences, called The Fugitive Blacksmith, published in 1849. Later, influenced by his wife Isabella, Hooker became involved in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, presenting a bill in the state legislature making husbands and wives equal in property rights, which finally passed in 1877.

The Hale-Rankin House (1789)

Earlier believed to have been built by Andrew Hale around 1754, with alterations made later in the Federal-style, the Hale-Rankin House is now thought to have been built in the Federal style in 1789. Located on Main Street in Glastonbury, it was built by Benjamin Hale and was later owned by the Reverend Samuel Rankin in the nineteenth century. Rankin was an abolitionist who told stories of people fleeing slavery by crossing the ice on the Ohio River. These stories influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s story of Eliza crossing the ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The house’s doorway is featured in Plate XXIV of Frederick Kelly’s Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut. Post Edited 5/27/08.

Harriet Beecher Stowe House (1871)

Built on Forest Street in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood in 1871 for a lawyer named Franklin Chamberlin, this house was bought two years later by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She lived here with her husband, Calvin Stowe (a retired minister and professor) and two unmarried twin daughters, Hatty and Eliza. In 1878 she completed her last novel Poganuc People, based on her early years growing up in Litchfield. After Stowe died in 1896, the twins sold the house and it was later bought, in 1927, by Katharine Seymour Day (Stowe’s great-niece and the granddaughter of Isabella Beecher Hooker), who left it to become a museum. The house was restored in the 1960s and is open to the public as part of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.

Roseland Cottage (1846)

Built in 1846 in Woodstock as a summer home for Henry Chandler Bowen. He had grown up in the town, but later went to Brooklyn, NY and became a wealthy dry goods merchant. He was also an abolitionist and Republican, who hosted famous Fourth of July celebrations on his property, which included such guests as Ulysses S. Grant (who had to endure Bowen’s teetotaling). The Gothic Revival house and the grounds, which include a boxwood garden, reflect the ideas of Andrew Jackson Downing (as presented in such books as The Architecture of Country Houses) on rural dwellings and country landscaping. The house is now a museum administered by Historic New England.