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The Chamberlin-Burr Day House, headquarters of the Harriet
Beecher Stowe Center, derives its name from its prominent
owners.
In 1881, Franklin Chamberlin (1821-1896), an established
Hartford lawyer, real estate developer and onetime member of
the Connecticut House of Representatives, commissioned the
architect Francis H. Kimball, of the firm Kimball & Wisedell
(NYC), to design a house on the corner of Farmington Avenue
and Forest Street. Completed in 1884, the Chamberlain house was the
residence of his wife Mary (Porter) Chamberlin until her death in
1908 when it was bought by Charles Stearns, who owned it
until 1911.
In 1911 Willie O. Burr (1843-1921), owner and editor of
the Hartford Daily Times, purchased the house. It remained the Burr Residence until the death of his wife Angie (Lincoln) Burr in 1939.
It was at this time that Katharine Seymour Day
(1870-1964), grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, bought the
house, saving it from commercial development. She resided in
the Stowe House and rented out what is now called the Day
House to her cousins. The Day House later served to store the increasing
accumulation of documents, furniture, and furnishings that
Day collected and which, in part, became the core of the
Harriet Beecher Stowe Center's library and museum
collections.
The Stowe, Beecher, Hooker, Seymour, Day Memorial Library
and Historical Foundation, parent organization of The
Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, was incorporated in 1941. Day
transferred ownership of the Chamberlin-Burr Day House to
the Center in 1962. The underground library vault was added
in 1971.
The first floor plan of the house includes an open entrance
foyer, small reception room in the northeast corner, formal
parlor (now exhibition gallery), conservatory, dinning room
in the southeast corner (originally separated from the hall
by pocket doors), and the kitchen and pantry areas of the
service wing. The second floor bedrooms, accessed by the
formal staircase, also form around an open
central-hall-cum-sitting-room, which is now the reading room
for library/museum researchers. On the third floor, the
formal staircase opens onto the former billiard room - now collection
storage - and ends at an interior balcony that looks
westward onto the property. The designs for the woodwork
throughout the house were the work of the architect, who
chose differing woods, particularly oak and cherry, for a
variety of presentations.
Founder of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, she was a woman
of remarkably varied interests and accomplishments. A grandniece
of Harriet Beecher Stowe and granddaughter of John and Isabella
Beecher Hooker, she studied at the Atelier Moderne in Paris and painted in
the Neo-Impressionist manner, especially influenced by the pointillist
technique developed by Georges Seurat. Although born in Hartford,
she resided during much of her earlier life in Europe. At the age
of forty-seven she entered Radcliffe College and earned an M.A. in
psychology. She bought and settled in the Harriet Beecher Stowe House
in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1927. Within a year she became involved
in the successful efforts to purchase and save Mark Twain's Hartford
home. Katharine Day was deeply concerned about city planning and was
a member of the Hartford City Planning Commission from 1928 until 1931.
She was instrumental in establishing the Children's Museum of Hartford
and served as its first president. In 1937 she earned another M.A.,
in history, from Trinity College in Hartford. In the same year she
established her own foundation, which was charted by the General Assembly
in 1942. Through her foresight and generosity, she restored the Harriet
Beecher Stowe house and established a major Hartford area tourist site
and research center. The library is built around the nucleus of books
and manuscripts that she had collected over many years.
It is free and open to the general public by appointment.
Since the library is non-circulating, the collections can only be used in the reading room or other designated areas on-site.
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