Relaunch: Nook Farm Walking Tour

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

March 22nd, 2023

Take a Walk through History

Seeing Is Revealing: A Neighborhood Walking Tour

At the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

In-Person Guided Tours: Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays at 3p.m. | $15pp

Self-guided Audio Tour: Anytime! $15 for the card, for 30 days unlimited listening

Seeing Is Revealing is an innovative new guided and self-guided walking tour, created by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.
In-person guided tours are available every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 3 pm; to register, visit our website and our online ticketing system. Pre-registration is encouraged but walk-ins are welcome.
Debuting as a self-guided, downloadable audio tour too. To purchase the self-guided tour, please visit the Visitor Center during regular business hours.
The self-guided app, for smartphones and tablets, serves the tour content in both English and Spanish.
The self-guided app provides easily accessible ADA accommodations.

HARTFORD, CT – The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center invites everyone to walk through history with our new neighborhood walking tour, Seeing Is Revealing: Nook Farm Then and Now. Alongside the guide-led walking tours, visitors can also purchase a self-guided walking tour.

Seeing Is Revealing introduces visitors to Harriet Beecher Stowe and her neighbors situated in Nook Farm, the place they called home, in the late 19^th century. While walking around the block, visitors will see preservation history and architecture alongside a vibrant, busy, and ever-changing city. The tour content expands the timeline of Harriet’s era into today. Visitors will be invited to consider: What drives preservation decisions? How did this neighborhood evolve? What histories are told and what histories are hidden? Seeing Is Revealing discusses social disparities that impact the contemporary Asylum Hill neighborhood.

The tour begins at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, moves through the grounds where the Stowe and Mark Twain historic homes are located, and then travels out to Hartford’s broader Asylum Hill neighborhood. The walk is just under a mile, and there are places to sit enroute.

Seeing Is Revealing was developed thanks to major funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Stowe Center worked with scholars from a variety of discipline areas, as well as local historians, to develop the tour’s themes and storylines. “Local historian Steve Thornton was the lead writer for the project,” said Amy Hufnagel, Director of Programming and Visitor Experience; “He brought unique knowledge and a ‘people’s history lens’ to the work.”

Thornton has researched and written extensively on current political issues and local people’s history. He focuses particularly on the forgotten stories of workers. His work has appeared in Connecticut Explored, the Hartford Courant, the Industrial Worker, Labor Notes, Justice (ILGWU), Hartford Business Journal, Hartford News, The Guardian (U.S.), Z Magazine, CT Mirror, ConnecticutHistory.org, Havana Times, People’s World, LAWCHA On Line, and other publications.

Thornton conducts city walking tours, workshops, and lectures in classrooms, churches, bars, union halls, and picket lines. He is the author of A Shoeleather History of the Wobblies: Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Connecticut (Red Sun Press, 2013), Wicked Hartford (The History Press, 2017), and Good Trouble: A Shoeleather History of Nonviolent Direct Action (Hard Ball Press, 2019). He maintains the website The Shoeleather History Project which documents and explores progressive organizing from Hartford’s grassroots.

Other scholars involved in the project include Fiona Vernal, UCONN Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, local waterways, landscape advocate, and Park Watershed Director Mary Rickel Pelletier, Lucinda Brockway from Past Designs, and historian Steve Courtney.

The Stowe Center chose to work with an innovative new company out of Barcelona, Spain and Berlin, Germany for the tour development. NUBART is a European Company that has developed a proprietary audio guide system using non-transferable cards, The Audio Guide Visitors Keep! No devices or downloadable apps are required. The visitor uses their own smartphone to read the codes and keeps the card to continue reading and learning even after the tour is complete.

Seeing Is Revealing is offered as an in-person, guided experience every weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) at 3:00pm, with advance tickets available for purchase online; it requires four (4) people to register for the tour to run and if the minimum occupancy is not met, then the Stowe Center gives visitors the self-guided experience in exchange. The tour will also be available as a downloadable self-guided audio experience that must be purchased at the Visitor Center and costs $15; the download can be used by multiple people for up to 30 days.

For more information, and for tickets, visit: https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/about/why-visit-the-stowe-center/

For additional information about NUBART and the audio tour, please visit: https://www.nubart.eu/

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The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is a museum, research library, and program center in Hartford, Connecticut. The Stowe Center’s mission is to preserve and interpret Stowe’s Hartford home and the Center’s historic collections, promote vibrant discussion of her life and work, and inspire commitment to social justice and positive change. For general information and updates, visit www.HarrietBeecherStoweCenter.org.

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CONTACT: Christina Tom

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

860.522.9258 x305 | ctom@stowecenter.org

Isabella Beecher Hooker

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.

School Group Interest Form 2023

Group Tour Interest Form 2022