Seeing Is Revealing: A New Neighborhood Walking Tour

October 6, 2022

Seeing Is Revealing: A New Neighborhood Walking Tour

to Debut for Free at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

Throughout Indigenous Peoples Day holiday weekend, the Stowe Center will offer its new neighborhood walking tour free to interested visitors. Tours will be offered Friday through Monday at 10 am and 3 pm.
Seeing Is Revealing is an innovative new walking tour, created by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. It launches as an in-person guided tour October 7 and debuts as a self-guided, downloadable audio tour in December 2022.

HARTFORD, CT –The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is excited to announce the debut of a new neighborhood walking tour, Seeing Is Revealing: Nook Farm Then and Now.

Throughout Indigenous Peoples Day weekend (the federal Columbus Day weekend), from Friday October 7 through Monday October 10, the tour will be offered free at 10 am and 3 pm. Each tour is capped at twenty people, and pre-registration is encouraged to ensure a spot. Registrants should use the Hartford resident button this weekend to sign up for free. The tour does not run if fewer than three people register.

Seeing Is Revealing introduces visitors to Harriet Beecher Stowe and her neighbors in Nook Farm, the place that they called home. On this block in Hartford, visitors will see preservation history and architecture alongside a vibrant, busy, and ever-changing city. On tour, guides expand the timeline out of Harriet’s era and into today. Visitors will walk and learn about landscape design, urban planning, economics, and creative trends in Hartford throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The tour will answer a number of interesting questions: how are decisions made about what remains and what has been replaced? What is the preservation story? How did this neighborhood evolve? What histories are told and what histories are hidden in this place? Seeing Is Revealing discusses social disparities and parities that impact what visitors experience now in the Asylum Hill neighborhood.

The tour meets at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, moves through the grounds where Stowe’s and Mark Twain’s historic homes are located, and then out toward Hartford’s broader Asylum Hill community.

After its debut weekend, Seeing Is Revealing will be offered as an in-person, guided experience every weekend at 3 pm, with advance tickets available for purchase online. The tour will also be available as a downloadable self-guided audio experience starting December 2022.

Seeing Is Revealing was developed through funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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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: Anita Durkin

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

860.522.9258

adurkin@stowecenter.org

School Group Interest Form

School Group Interest Form 2023

Thank you so much for your interest in a group tour at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center! Please help us schedule your visit by answering the questions below.

School name:

Please suggest three dates and times when your group would like to visit. (Note: the Stowe Center is closed on Sunday and Tuesday.)

Contact Teacher Name:

Contact Teacher Email:(Required)

Contact Teacher Phone Number:(Required)

Number of students expected to attend:(Required)

Please enter a number from 8 to 40.

Please identify the grade level(s) of attending students:(Required)

Likely number of chaperones (including other teachers):

The Stowe Center requires one adult per every 10 students.

Are there special student, teacher, or chaperone accommodations that can help us serve you best?

Do you plan to have lunch on site?

Yes, please.

No, thank you.

Are you interested in scheduling a joint visit with our neighbor, The Mark Twain House and Museum?

Yes, please

No, thank you.

If yes, have you already contacted The Mark Twain House?

Yes

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.