Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
77 Forest Street
Hartford, CT 06105
860-522-9258
info@stowecenter.org
The work continues on the new gardens! Supported by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving Love Your Block grant, we have added phlox, black-eyed Susans, Joe Pye weed, spirea, milkweed, and more to attract bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. Around the Sensory Garden, we added a new ceramic bird bath and a deep tone wind chime, hung in the Magnolia, that sounds lovely and will relax your mind.
The work is underway!
After receiving the Love Your Block grant thanks to Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and the City of Hartford, the Stowe Center joined with KNOX to begin the work on Harriet’s Backyard. KNOX apprentices and Stowe Center Staff & Garden Volunteers made great work: the veggie beds are already starting to produce, the Sensory Garden is blooming, and the Pollinator Garden has been expanded and ready for planting. The heritage rose bushes have been relocated to widen the driveway for busses and mobility supporting vehicles later this Fall.
In our buildings, we began by removing asbestos containing materials from the Katharine S. Day House and Visitor Center basements, and around eighteen exterior windows.
Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker (1822-1907)
An ardent member of the woman’s suffrage movement, Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker joined in the cause along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Isabella was the first child of Lyman Beecher and his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher.
Isabella began her education at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary and lived with her sister Mary Perkins. In 1841 she married John Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. John Hooker was a lawyer and an abolitionist.
In the early 1860s Isabella got involved in the woman’s suffrage movement. Isabella joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She was a founding member of the Connecticut Woman’s Suffrage Association. Isabella’s ideas of equality were influenced by John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty and the Subjection of Women.
In 1871, Isabella organized the annual convention of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in Washington D.C. and presented her argument before the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Her husband, John Hooker, believed in his wife and supported her activities. He helped Isabella draft a bill to the Connecticut Legislature giving married women the same property rights as their husbands. The bill passed in 1877. Isabella annually submitted a bill granting women the right to vote, but it did not pass in her lifetime.