Saving Uncle Tom's cabin

ROCKVILLE, Md. — In the brisk Washington real-estate market, the white colonial was an easy sale: three bedrooms, easy access to a major commuting route and an acre, a rarity in the tightly packed suburbs.

However, the 18th-century house had one thing neighboring McMansions could never claim: the original Uncle Tom's cabin.

Attached to the side of the house is a small, one-room cabin, its walls made of graying split-oak beams. A massive stone chimney rises at the back, above the large hearth where slaves once tended meals for a plantation owner.

The cabin 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 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.

Less than a month after being put on the market for about $1 million, the cabin and the house are being purchased by Montgomery County.

"We don't want it to turn into a dentist's office," said Peggy Erickson, executive director of Heritage Montgomery, an agency that promotes historic tourism and that worked with the county to raise money to buy the house.

The owners signed a contract last week with the county, rejecting rival bids from a group of doctors that wanted to establish a center to study world health and a private bidder. The sale price wasn't released. The sale is expected to be final at the end of January.

Greg Mallet-Prevost's parents had owned the house since the early 1960s, and he and his siblings put it up for sale after his mother died in September at 100. The Mallet-Prevosts were history buffs and took great care of the cabin, he said.

The house was once the anchor of a 3,700-acre farm that sprawled over much of modern-day Rockville. It was owned by Isaac Riley, who bought Henson and his mother in the 1790s.

"My parents were history people," Mallet-Prevost 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. "This house basically fell between the cracks," said Judy Christensen, a historian who is preservation planner for Rockville. "It's a site of national importance."

"Head bloodied"

Henson was born in Charles County, Md., in 1789. One of his first memories, he wrote in his autobiography, was the sight of his father "with his head bloodied and his back lacerated." The father had received 100 lashes and had his right ear cut off for beating the white overseer who had assaulted Henson's mother. When the master of that southern Maryland plantation sold off Henson's family, scattering his parents and siblings to the highest bidders, Henson and his mother ended up in Montgomery on the plantation owned by Riley.

There, Henson rose to become superintendent of the farm operation, in charge of production and sales at markets in Washington and Georgetown (then separate cities). As Henson wrote in "The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave," Riley was "quite incompetent to attend to the business himself. For many years I was his factotum, and supplied him with all his means for all his purposes, whether they were good or bad."

Riley's lousy business sense eventually landed him in big trouble. In 1825, the farmer arranged to send his slaves out of state so his creditors couldn't take them. Henson was put in charge of taking 18 slaves, his wife and two children to Riley's brother's farm in Kentucky. Henson wrote of leading his group through Ohio, a free state, where "we were frequently told that we were free, if we chose to be so."

Surely, Henson was tempted. "From my earliest recollection, freedom had been the object of my ambition," he wrote. "No other means of obtaining it, however, had occurred to me, but purchasing myself of my master. The idea of running away was not one that I had ever indulged. I had a sentiment of honor on the subject."

Henson decided it would be wrong to run: "I had promised that man to take his property to Kentucky, and deposit it with his brother; and this, and this only, I resolved to do."

Viewed as a traitor

Henson's choice, as portrayed in Stowe's novel and the minstrel shows that kept Uncle Tom famous into the 20th century, morphed into a popular view of Uncle Tom as a traitor to his race. But many readers come away from Henson and Stowe's books seeing the slave as a hero. "He is morally and intellectually superior to his white masters," Christensen said. "They're lazy, where he is hardworking. He's true to his word, where they are not."

In Kentucky, Henson worked the farm, earned money as a preacher and saved so he could return to Rockville to buy his freedom. It is in the recounting of that return to Maryland that Henson describes the cabin: "At night I was sent to such quarters as I had been accustomed to long enough, the cabin used for a kitchen, with its earth floor, its filth, and its numerous occupants."

When Riley later reneged on a promise to free him, Henson and his family escaped to Canada in 1830 through the Underground Railroad.

The Uncle Tom characterization as a traitor to his race overlooks Henson's later life in Canada, where he founded a settlement at Dresden, Ontario, that welcomed escaped slaves, said Steven Cook, manager of the Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site there.

Canada maintains Henson's house in Ontario as the home of Uncle Tom's cabin, but Maryland historians say that title belongs in Maryland because this was Henson's home during the period Stowe describes. "This is where he lived as a slave," said Gwen Wright, acting chief of the county planning division. "This is really it."