Historic Uncle Tom’s Cabin - lost, found, preserved
Posted in Historic Home on Apr 16th, 2007 No Comments »
And the property is for sale.
Its owner, Hildegarde Mallet-Prevost, died in September at 100, and her family is selling the three-bedroom colonial (literally) with the attached log cabin that was once home to Josiah Henson — the slave whose 1849 autobiography was the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
A century and a half later, an Uncle Tom has come to mean a black man who obsequiously seeks white approval or betrays his race. But the cabin in North Bethesda, just south of the city of Rockville, is also a symbol of the strength and savvy that enabled Henson to rise from slavery to build a pioneering life of learning and achievement.
