Home of Calvin Ellis Stowe
This 1816 Federal-style home in South Natick was the childhood home of Calvin Ellis Stowe a biblical scholar and later the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Calvin Stowe became a scholar of Hebrew and biblical literature and met Harriet Beecher at the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. They married in 1836, and he was instrumental in supporting her when she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the novel that changed the course of American history.
Although Harriet never lived in South Natick, she visited the Stowe family home with her husband. In her 1869 novel, “Oldtown Folks”, she transformed South Natick into the fictional “Oldtown”, a New England village rooted in memory. She wrote:
“Oldtown was one of those quiet New England villages where everything has a settled, orderly air; where houses seem to have grown up like the elms, with a certain venerable grace, where the generations have followed one another like the leaves upon the trees” Harriet may not have lived in South Natick, but she absorbed the rhythms of a small town in Massachusetts.
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