State Buys Home Whose Owner Inspired a Classic

State officials accepted the deed to the home of the former slave who inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe when she wrote the abolitionist novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The home, about 12 miles north of Washington, D.C., was put up for sale last year, after the death of Hildegarde Mallet-Prevost, 100, who owned the property. The state purchased the three-bedroom, wood-frame house for $1 million, and it could become an interpretive historical site. It was the home of Josiah Henson, whose short autobiography, “The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave,” inspired Stowe’s work.