The Katharine Seymour Day House is a historic house at 77 Forest Street in the historic Nook Farm district of

Hartford Hartford is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. The city, located in Hartford County, Connecticut, Hartford County, had a population of 121,054 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 ce ...

Connecticut Connecticut ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York (state), New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. ...

. Built in 1884 for a local businessman seeking to compete stylistically with the adjacent

Mark Twain House The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, was the home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) and his family from 1874 to 1891. The Clemens family had it designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter and built in the American High Got ...

, it is a good local example of Queen Anne architecture. It now serves as the administrative center and library for the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1971.

Description and history

The Katharine Seymour Day House is located in the Nook Farm area of Hartford's Asylum Hill neighborhood, at the southwest corner of Farmington Avenue and Forest Street. It is just east of the Mark Twain House, and north of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. The house is a -story stone structure, built out of a multicolored combination of brownstone and limestone. It is a fine local example of Queen Anne Victorian architecture, with a busy exterior in terms of color and organization, with projecting gables, dormers and porches. The interior features high quality woodwork, plasterwork and tile. Katherinedayhouse

The house was designed by

Francis H. Kimball Francis Hatch Kimball (September 24, 1845 – December 20, 1919) was an American architect practicing in New York City, best known for his work on skyscrapers in lower Manhattan and terra-cotta ornamentation. He was an associate with the firm Ki ...

and was built for Franklin Chamberlin; the project was completed in 1884.Sterner, Daniel. ''A Guide to Historic Hartford, Connecticut''. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012: 152. Chamberlin is believed to have built the house as a rival to the adjacent

; he had previously sold the adjacent land to

Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Fau ...

on which his house was built. The house was later owned by Willie Olcott Burr, publisher of ''

The Hartford Times ''The Hartford Times'' was a daily afternoon newspaper serving the Hartford, Connecticut, community from 1817 to 1976. It was owned for decades by the Gannett Company which sold the financially struggling paper in 1973 to the owners of the ''New ...

'' newspaper. It was purchased by

Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (; June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American author and Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and wrote the popular novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (185 ...

's grandniece

Katharine Seymour Day Katharine Seymour Day (May 8, 1870 - June 4, 1964) was an American preservationist from Hartford, Connecticut. She worked as a member of the Hartford City Planning Commission to preserve historic homes in Connecticut and helped establish the Childr ...

in 1940, as part of a plan to preserve the surroundings of the Stowe House (which was also originally built for Chamberlin). Day established the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in 1941 as a nonprofit vehicle to preserve Stowe's legacy. The house now houses the center's administrative offices, and a research library containing many of Stowe's materials.

References

{{National Register of Historic Places Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Connecticut Queen Anne architecture in Connecticut Houses completed in 1884 Houses in Hartford, Connecticut National Register of Historic Places in Hartford, Connecticut Historic district contributing properties in Connecticut Harriet Beecher Stowe

Description and history

See also

References