Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

We know that Harriet’s older sister Catherine was a master hand at making dolls. With scissors, needle, paint and other materials she could make dolls of all sizes, sexes and colors, and surround them with all sorts of droll contrivances. For instance, she once made a Queen of Sheba with a gold crown, seated her in a chariot made of half a pumpkin drawn by four prancing steeds fashioned out of crook-necked squashes, whose ears and legs she whittled out and fastened securely in their proper places. Then she manufactured a negro driver and placed him above with the reins in hand. Her care and artistry were rewarded by the admiration and amusement of the whole family. It was certainly worth a great deal to the little Harriet to have a sister like that, and we believe that the exercise of Catherine’s talents was not wholly selfish.

In “Poganuc People,” Mrs. Stowe, remembering her own childhood well, gives to the young heroine a gorgeous wooden doll with staring glass eyes. This precious treasure was the central point in all Dolly’s arrangements. To this companion Dolly showed her stores of chestnuts and walnuts, gave jay-bird feathers and bluebird’s wings, and a set of tea cups made out of the backbone of a codfish. She brushed and curled the doll’s hair till she took all the curl out of it, and washed all the paint off its cheeks in her motherly zeal.

Besides her doll and its excellent codfish backbone tea-set—and no one who has not tried to make them, by the way, can know how beautiful and delicate such tea cups can be—Harriet had in her earliest play days an unfailing source of occupation and delight in the gigantic woodpile in the back yard where the fuel for the season was laid up in long rows eight or ten feet high. Here was a world of marvels. The child skipped and sung and climbed among its intricacies, finding and collecting wonderful treasures, green velvet mosses, little white trees of lichen that seemed to have tiny apples upon them, fine scarlet cups and fairy caps. From these materials she constructed miniature landscapes in which the mosses made the fields, little sprigs of spruce and ground pine the trees, and bits of broken glass the lakes and rivers, reflecting the overshadowing banks.

With such delights as these, Harriet was busy, healthy and happy. When her brothers came home from the Academy in the evening and tossed her up in their long arms, her laugh rang out gay and loud as if there were no such thing as disappointment in the world. Sometimes the other children joined her in the magic field of the woodpile. Then they made themselves houses, castles and fortresses. They played at giving parties and entertainments at which the dog and the cat assisted. They held town meetings also, and had voting days with speeches against the Democrats. (The word did not mean then what it does now.) They held religious meetings, too, sung hymns and preached sermons, and on these occasions Harriet was known to exhort and recite texts of Scripture with a degree of fervor that seemed to produce a great effect upon her auditors. Thus the woodpile became a great forum of debate as well as a studio of art, and Harriet was the first to welcome the time when its stores should be reinforced at that great event of the year, the wood-spell.

A wood-spell is an old-fashioned sort of donation party. The pastor used to be settled with the understanding that he should receive a certain sum of money as salary, and his wood, just as in Easthampton, Long Island, Dr. Beecher’s first pastorate, one-fourth of the whales that were stranded on the beach was assigned to the minister as a part of his yearly payment. In Litchfield a day was set apart in the winter about the time when the sleighs were running most smoothly over the pressed snow, and on that day every parishioner was to bring to the minister a sled-load of wood. This was built up in the back yard of the parsonage into a mighty woodpile for the year’s use. When Harriet was five years old, partly because sorrow had visited the Beecher family that year, and partly because of a quickened religious enthusiasm throughout the community, the wood-spell of that winter was more than usually interesting and the number of loads very generous. With her father’s rejoicing approval, Harriet’s elder sister, Catherine, now sixteen years old, was allowed to take the whole responsibility of preparing the banquet for the occasion. This meant a great deal. Everything in the house must be spick and span; dozens of doughnuts must be cooked; and, above all, the wood-spell cake must be made.

For nearly a week the kitchen was as busy as an ant-hill. The fat was prepared to fry the doughnuts, the spices were pounded, the flour was sifted, the materials for the flips were collected. Catherine was assisted by eleven-year-old Mary; William, Edward and George split and brought in an incredible amount of wood for the oven, and the girls sat all the evening about the kitchen fire stoning raisins, with the best story-teller in the midst to make the time pass—and she, we are sure, could have been none other than Harriet.

Then came the baking of the cake. For two days beforehand the fire was surrounded by a row of earthen jars in which the spicy compound was rising to the necessary lightness. At exactly the quivering instant for perfection each loaf was shoved into the little black door of the brick oven.

At last all the wood-spell loaves came out victorious, while each helper merrily claimed merit for the baking.

The frying of the doughnuts was also a matter of the greatest delicacy, requiring experience and the nicest art; but this also was a triumph. Catherine said, “Were I to tell how many loaves I have put in and taken out of the oven, and how many bushels of doughnuts I have boiled over the kitchen fire, I fear my credit for veracity would be endangered.”

Finally all was finished. A mighty cheese was brought; every shelf in the closet and all the dressers of the kitchen were crowded with the abundance. The delicious stores of food were indeed a sight to behold, calling in admiring visitors, and Catherine’s success was a matter of universal congratulation. But may we not give Harriet some credit, too? For though her part may have been largely the care of the younger children, still, without her help, Catherine would not have been free to do the work.