The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is a Gothic Victorian cottage surrounded by a colorful flower garden. The house has many innovations of the era, such as faux wood finishes painted on the woodwork. Commercial cans from the late 19th century that were used to store baking ingredients are waiting in readiness on the shelves in the cosy little kitchen. Victorian furniture graces the living room and other rooms in the house. Harriet liked to collect commemoration plates and statues related to her famous book and the collection is still right there in her home.

The center was equipped to supply information about her life and times. She moved to Cincinnati as a young woman. There she met her husband, Calvin, a young minister and teacher. Cincinnati is across the Ohio River from Kentucky and Harriet saw the fugitive slaves trying to escape from their masters. She knew the abolitionists who helped them through the Underground Railroad and she attended anti-slavery debates. Her sister, Isabella, was married to John Hooker, an abolitionist from Farmington, CT; they lived there during the time Amistad captives were boarding in that town.

Calvin Stowe was teaching at Bowdoin College in Maine when Harriet began writing and selling her work to supplement his income. She had just experienced the death of her young son and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had just been past. The pain of being permanently parted from her own child was overwhelming, and she found she could express it in the context of the forced separation of mothers from children through slavery as she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At first this novel was published in an abolitionist newspaper, and then the publisher's wife told Calvin it should be published in book form. It was, and it helped incite the Civil War. About twenty years later the Stowes moved to Hartford where Harriet was surrounded by Woman’s Sufferage and other movements of the day her family was very involved in.