Uncle Tom''s Cabin
Some 25km south of Oil Springs, Hwy 21 slips through the agricultural town of DRESDEN , which is itself just 2km from Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site (mid-May to June & Sept to mid-Oct Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun noon-4pm; July & Aug Mon-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun noon-4pm; $5), where a handful of old wooden buildings incorporates a simple church and the clapboard house that was once the home of the Reverend Josiah Henson , a slave who fled from Maryland to Canada in 1830 by means of the Underground Railroad . Henson and a group of abolitionist sympathizers subsequently bought 200 acres of farmland round Dresden and founded a vocational school for runaway slaves known as the "British American Institute". Unable to write, Henson dictated his life experiences and in 1849 these narrations were published as The Life of Josiah Henson - Formerly a Slave . It's a powerful tract, unassuming and almost matter-of-fact in the way it describes the routine savagery of slavery - and it was immediately popular. One of its readers was Harriet Beecher Stowe , who met Henson and went on to write the most influential abolitionist text of the day, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), basing her main character on Henson's accounts. Most of the Dresden refugees returned to the US after the Civil War, but Henson stayed on, accumulating imperial honours that must have surprised him greatly. He was even presented to Queen Victoria and, in commemoration of this royal connection, his tombstone, which stands outside the complex, is surmounted by a crown. He died in 1883. Henson's book is hard to get hold of, but copies ($6) are sold here at the interpretive centre , where there's also a small museum on slavery and the UGRR plus an intriguing video giving more details on Henson's life and times.
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