Garrard County Judge/Executive John Wilson, Garrard County Economic Development Director, Nathan Mick and Garrard Tourism Chair, Skip Gladfelter, and the trustees of The Governor William Owsley House Foundation Inc., all hope the interpretation of this cabin would be a starting point in telling the significant African-American history in Garrard County; from detailing the numerous African American cultural contributions, as well as, the history of slavery, the Underground Railroad, black Union troops and the civil rights era.
Also, officials and trustees plan to visually depict how “Pleasant Retreat” was farmed in the 19th century and document Garrard County’s significant connection to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom's Cabin” which begins and ends in Kentucky and mainstreamed the anti-slavery movement eight years prior to the Civil War.
To day, Stowe's searing novel of slave life, is considered controversial in its depiction of African Americans, but in 1852, the book was received as damming indictment of the South’s “Particular Institution” and propelled the abolition movement to the forefront of American politics and consciousness.
In the first year 2 million copies were sold, world wide, and licensed and unauthorized staged versions were enacted in New York & London. Stowe upon arriving in England in 1853 was shocked by the extent of “Uncle Tom” mania, where the book sold three times more than in the States.
The English used images of her book to sell everything from undergarments to pastries. Despite the use of degrading caricatures, the end result was an unprecedented awareness of slavery as a crime against humanity and the exposure of the hypocrisy of American democracy.
When President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862 at the White House, he reportedly told her, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"
About twenty years prior to her world wide best seller, Harriet Beecher Stowe visited a plantation between Lancaster and Paint Lick and toured Mason County, where encountered numerous aspects of Kentucky slave life.
Stowe ran a girls school in Cincinnati from 1832 to 1850. In 1833, she visited the Mason County community of Washington in northern Kentucky, where she witnessed a slave auction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son Charles Edward Stowe and grandson Lyman Beecher Stowe, state in their 1911 biography on her, that she “frequently visited Kentucky slave plantations, where she saw Negro slavery in that mild and patriarchal form in which she pictures it in the opening chapters of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
It is from these visits that she studied how slave owning families lived and interacted with their slaves. Stowe was dismayed by the tendency of her hostesses to gossip about the parentage of every one else’s light skinned servants, and not comment on their own.
The Garrard community’s connections to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, is detailed in The Courier-Journal’s May 16th, 1881, interview with the Rev. Lewis Clarke which states that he was the basis for the character George Harris.
Rev. Clarke, a son of a Scottish man & a “mulatto slave” ran away from the Kennedy’s plantation in 1841 at the age of 26 and found freedom in the North. He became a reverend and was active as an organizer in abolitionist circles. For a while, he lived with Stowe's sister-in-law, Mrs. Mary Safford in her Cambridgeport, Massachusetts home.
"Mrs. Stowe visited her relations every summer and took a deep interest in Lewis Clarke, his experience and his narrative of incidents, pathetic, humorous and terrible, of slave life, and the horrors which the system made possible," the newspaper story said. "She took full notes of all he told her, and afterwards put them to use which made the entire republic tremble when Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared...."
Under Stowe’s pen, Young Tom Kennedy and his wife became the indulgent and beloved Mr. And Mrs. Shelby of the book. Nancy, Young Tom's sister, a beautiful and thoughtful girl, was written as the tragic Little Eva. There is a local legend that Judith and America Randolph, whose graves are beneath the only two markers in a servant's burial plot in the Lexington cemetery, were Eliza and the baby she carried "across the ice."
The other connection Garrard Co. has to abolitionism, is Carry Nation, who was born as Carrie Moore in Garrard County in 1846. This famed anti-alcohol Temperance crusader, who furiously took an ax to bars and saloons, viewed 'the slavery of drink.' and the dependence on enslaved labor as interconnected social diseases to be cured with temperance and abolition.
“The cabin will highlight other aspects of African-American history and could partner with Camp Nelson, a Civil War training camp for black Union soldiers in Jessamine County,” said Nathan Mick, economic development director for Garrard County.
Linne? a women about 25 years old Amanda, girl 10
Milley, a woman 45 Derry, man 50
Berry, a boy 18 Jim Rainey, man 36
Ben, a boy 10 Anderson, man 19
Sam, a boy 7 Elijah, man 20
Lucinda, a girl 10 Richardson, man 17
Sally, girl 5 Jim, man 16
Mary, a women 26 Willis, man 14
Amy, a girl 4 Sebourne, man 10
George, a boy 6 Harriete?, man 15
Paulina, a girl 8 Loane? Man 45
John, a boy 6
Francis, a girl 6
Isaac, a boy 6
Caroline, a women 30
Delpha, a women 46
Hannah, women 46
