Oldtown Folks

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
wrote this 1869 novel with the intent of describing a
New England village's life and character in the years
after the Revolutionary War, before the advent of
industrialization. Said Stowe, in the voice of the novel's
narrator Horace Holyoke, "I would endeavor to show
you New England in its seed-bed, before the hot suns
of modern progress had developed its sprouting germs
into the great trees of today." She based some of the
book on the childhood memories of her husband,
Calvin Ellis Stowe, and the residents of his birthplace,
Natick, Massachusetts.