$1 to Buy Home of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Once, the rambling gray house had a magnificent arched attic, with garrets that were “splendid grounds for little people” and a view of Bantam Lake’s “girdle of steel-blue pines.”

There, Lyman Beecher wrote his sermons and his daughter, Harriet, curled up to read. She watched her father study, “turning his books and speaking from time to time to himself in a loud, earnest whisper.”

The wooden beams and floorboards of the house that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about so lovingly sag a little these days, and the windows are boarded up.

The 222-year-old house where the writer-abolitionist was born in 1811 has been moved twice, renovated and now sits abandoned, paint peeling, on the grounds of the private Forman school.

Recently, the school put the house on sale for $1, eager to replace it with a new dormitory. The move has landed the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” back at the center of a fierce debate about her place in U.S. history and literature.

“It sounds wonderful to keep the building as a museum on the school grounds, but it’s not realistic,” said the school’s headmaster, Mark Perkins. “We are not a historical society. As a school, we have to stay focused on our mission.”

Stowe described the house, where she lived for 13 years, as “a wide, roomy, windy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of afterthoughts.” It has been on the market for a year with no takers.

The school, which used the house as a dormitory for years, dropped the price from $50,000 a few weeks ago and threatened to demolish it Nov. 1 if no one came forward to save it.

The threat did exactly what it was intended to do, creating a local outcry and a flurry of interest from prospective buyers.

School officials said the Beecher homestead is too costly to renovate. They acknowledge that the $1 price tag is a gimmick and the actual cost of moving and rebuilding the house could be as high as $1 million.

To many in this picturesque New England town of stately mansions and lavish country homes, cost should come second to history. Stowe is, after all, the country’s most famous abolitionist, the woman whose 1852 novel moved readers to weep for slaves.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold 10,000 copies in the first week and established Stowe as a literary and intellectual phenomenon. When Abraham Lincoln met her 10 years after the book was published, he remarked, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that caused the big war.”

These days, tourists ask for directions to the house and traipse into Bill Keifer’s used bookstore looking for copies of Stowe’s autobiographical novel, “Poganuc People.” The book has colorful passages describing the Litchfield house.

“Can you imagine the hue and cry that would result if Lincoln’s birthplace had been on the Forman campus and that house were scheduled for demolition?” Keifer said. “It wouldn’t matter if it were only a couple of logs and a window sash; it would be saved and restored.”

The Litchfield Historical Society, amid a huge fund-raising effort to renovate the Tapping Reeve house, site of the first American law school, has also been embarrassed. The society concluded that it could never raise the money necessary to restore the Stowe house.

“Harriet wrote some wonderful descriptive passages about the house,” society director Cathy Fields said. “But it no longer resembles the house she wrote about.”

Joan Hedrick, an associate professor of history at Trinity College in Hartford who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for her biography of Stowe, said the history of the attic alone--which still looks as Stowe described it--makes the house worth saving.

Hedrick calls the house “a jewel that should be preserved at all costs.”

Meanwhile, the fight has prompted a new interest in Stowe’s writings about Litchfield.

“I remember standing often in the door of our house and looking over a distant horizon, where Mt. Tom reared its round blue head against the sky,” she wrote.

“Many a pensive, wondering hour have I sat at our playroom window, watching the glory of the wonderful sunsets that used to burn themselves out, amid voluminous wreathings, or castellated turrets of clouds--vaporous pageantry proper to a mountainous region.”