Historic Home Blog

Following is an excerpt from a very interesting article published in the Washington Post, December 13, 2005, written by Marc Fisher. Many local historic home enthusiasts were not aware that Uncle Tom’s Cabin exists and is located in Rockville, MD. Since the article was published, Montgomery County has been successful in funding the property’s purchase. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” summons visions of racial brutality in another place and time. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin stands today in Rockville, shaded by a row of trees from the speedway that is Old Georgetown Road.
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.
The cabin, where Henson lived during the time in which Stowe’s novel takes place, served for many years as the home office for Marcel Mallet-Prevost, Hildegarde’s husband and a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board who died in 2000. Their son Greg showed me around, pointing out the oak beams below, still covered in bark; the broad floorboards, probably original to the plantation house; the bedroom where he slept when he was home from college.
“My parents were history people,” Greg said. “They accommodated anyone who wanted to take pictures of the outside, and people came by constantly, but my parents wanted to be left alone on the inside.”
As a result, few historians have been inside the cabin. Those I spoke with could hardly contain their excitement. “This house basically fell between the cracks,” said Judy Christensen, a historian who is preservation planner for the city of Rockville. “It’s a site of national importance.”
The complete article…
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/12/AR2005121201387.html