Oldtown Folks

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Toms Cabin,wrote this 1869 novel with the intent of describing aNew England villages life and character in the yearsafter the Revolutionary War, before the advent ofindustrialization. Said Stowe, in the voice of the novelsnarrator Horace Holyoke, I would endeavor to showyou New England in its seed-bed, before the hot sunsof modern progress had developed its sprouting germsinto the great trees of today. She based some of thebook on the childhood memories of her husband,Calvin Ellis Stowe, and the residents of his birthplace,Natick, Massachusetts.