The 1775 Litchfield house where Harriet Beecher Stowe was born sits today dismantled in four storage bins.  The house has sat in a deconstructed state since 1998, when it was disassembled after serving for many years as a dormitory for the Forman School.  Virgil Rollins, whose New Hartford firm Virgil Rollins Restorations disassembled the house, is looking for a qualified buyer.

   Let me cut to the chase here: this house must be saved, primarily because it is the birthplace of the woman who first convincingly proclaimed the ideal of universal equality America claims to live by today. On meeting Mrs. Stowe, Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said “So you’re the little lady who started this big war.” Wallace Nutting, whose father died fighting for the Union, wrote that “Prof. Stowe thought his wife, Harriet, might get enough for a new dress out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The nation got a new dress.” Universal equality was the fashion through the Civil War and just after it, before being superseded by the cynicism of the Gilded Age. But, as anyone who knows anything about antiques understands, what was once stylish often has a way of coming back into fashion years or even decades later. In the 1960s, by which time Uncle Tom’s Cabin qualified for antique status, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech and the great passion for equality was alive again, becoming not just the law of the land, but its ultimate mission statement in the minds and hearts of the vast majority of the American people.

For more information contact:

Virgil Rollins

Virgil Rollins Restorations
PO Box 111  ·  New Hartford CT 06057
203-751-2100  ·  www.virgilrollinsrestorations.com
v8@virgilrollinsrestorations.com