The appliqued “Beecher” embroidery along the chair’s back signals a likely connection to one of America’s most influential families in the 1800s. Beginning with the formidable family patriarch Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), members of the Beecher family became influential public figures and made vital contributions to the evolution of American religion and reform movements, including the temperance movement, and abolition, and women’s suffrage.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1775, Lyman Beecher graduated from Yale College and became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1799. In addition to preaching to congregations in Long Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Ohio, Beecher devoted himself to advocating social reform. He cofounded the American Temperance Society in 1826, and was also a critic of slavery.

Beecher’s greater legacy, though, was undoubtedly his family. Ten of his thirteen children lived to adulthood and more than half went on to live very public lives. In 1863, the same year Lyman Beecher died, fellow minister Leonard Bacon quipped, “This country is inhabited by saints, sinners, and Beechers.” Members of the family, particularly Henry Ward, became so well known by the American public that “Beecher souvenirs” were common in the late nineteenth century.

All seven of Lyman’s sons—William, Edward, George, Henry Ward, Charles, Thomas, and James—followed him into the ministry and made their own marks as authors, speakers, educators, and military officers.

The women of the Beecher family were arguably even more impressive than the men. The eldest, Catharine, became a pioneer voice for women’s education. Isabella Beecher Hooker became a key activist in the women’s suffrage movement, alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. And Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fame rivaled that of both her father and younger brother, Henry Ward. In 1852, her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin hit bookshelves, laying bare the horrors of slavery in America. An instant success, it nearly surpassed the Bible as the best-selling book of the 1800s.

From his pulpit at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, Henry Ward Beecher became a leading voice against American slavery. Through passionate sermons, popular lectures, and essays, Beecher exposed Northern audiences to the cruelties of the practice that many chose to ignore. Beecher was known for his flair for the dramatic. This pulpit chair was in use at Plymouth Church during Beecher’s most shocking anti-slavery spectacles: his mock slave auctions of the 1850s and early 1860s. 

These events were essentially theatrical fundraisers that coopted the format of the auction block to expose Beecher’s amassed audiences to the cruel spectacle of slavery. Always featuring young, typically light-skinned enslaved women and girls, these events promoted an “acceptable” form of blackness that allowed Beecher to lambast slavery while also raising the money needed to purchase the freedom of the featured women.

Plymouth Church held at least six public “auctions” before the end of the Civil War. The sale of Sally Marie Diggs in 1860 left a lasting impression on Beecher’s congregation. Diggs, an enslaved nine-year-old born just outside Washington D.C., was brought to Beecher’s attention by Virginia Rev. John Falkner Blake as a worthy candidate for Beecher’s next auction. A surviving bill of sale in the BHS collection shows that Blake purchased Diggs from her enslaver, John C. Cook, for $900. The funds that Beecher raised purchased Diggs’ legal freedom from the Reverend Blake.

Beecher’s congregation raised more than $1,000 to purchase Diggs’ freedom. For the young girl, the event was a significant and complex moment in her life. She earned her freedom, but only after her mother and sisters had been sold by their enslaver, separating the family forever. Beecher christened Diggs with a new name, Rose Ward, combining a part of his name with that of one of his parishioners, Rose Terry, who contributed a ring to the collection to purchase Diggs’ freedom.

Although the act of purchase and patronage stripped her of her previous identity, Rose Ward persevered in her new life with her new name. After the auction, she returned to Washington, D.C. with her grandmother, Chloe Diggs, where she worked as a seamstress before attending Howard University, a historically black college. While in college, Ward met her future husband, James Hunt. 

Ward returned to Brooklyn only once, in 1927, for the eightieth anniversary celebration of Beecher’s first sermon at Plymouth Church. A selection of her remarks to the congregation at the celebration were recorded on a wax cylinder—an early form of sound recording—that survives today in the BHS collection. Rose Ward’s intertwined history with those of Beecher and Plymouth Church is a reminder today that Brooklyn was a key battleground in the complex negotiation of slavery and racism in America.

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[F10 tombstone]
Rose Ward Hunt wax cylinder, 1927
Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims and Henry Ward Beecher collection (ARC.212)
Brooklyn Historical Society

Why are certain artifacts preserved? Some are kept because they are considered works of art; others because of their connection to significant historical figures or events. For this mid-1800s Rococo Revival side chair, its “Beecher” embroidery proudly announces its claim to fame and the reason for its preservation.

Henry Ward Beecher was hand-selected as the minister of Brooklyn’s new Plymouth Church in 1847 by a group of prominent Brooklynites who were attracted to his passionate sermons and progressive stance on issues like slavery. In early 1849, a fire destroyed the original church on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights. The church that stands today is the second Plymouth Church, equipped with the stage-like platform upon which Beecher moved freely when speaking. The platform did not have a traditional pulpit, preferring this platform with just a desk and a set of chairs, including the one now in the BHS collection.

This pulpit furniture “bore witness” to Beecher’s rise to national fame. From his pulpit platform Beecher condemned slavery and supported the Union cause throughout the Civil War. Plymouth Church retired its original pulpit furniture in 1868 and replaced it with new furnishings carved from the wood of an olive tree brought back from Jerusalem by a parishioner. The old furniture moved to storage and was, for a time, forgotten.

Beecher’s death in the spring of 1887 was national news, his Brooklyn funeral reportedly attended by 50,000 mourners. In subsequent decades, members of the Plymouth Church congregation guarded Beecher’s reputation and memory. At one point, they were determined to build a “fireproof vault” in the church basement to serve as a museum to Beecher. In 1898, when the old pulpit chairs resurfaced in storage, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that “numerous offers on the part of old members of the church to receive them as souvenirs were filed.”

Preserved as a Beecher relic, this chair stands apart from commemorative Beecher souvenirs that flooded the market following his funeral because of its known connection to the preacher during his lifetime.

Thanks to the generosity of the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation, in 2019, BHS was able to commission critical conservation work to stabilize Henry Ward Beecher’s chair. Funds supported the preparation of this valuable historic artifact for future exhibition and ensured its preservation for future generations. 

From the pulpit at Plymouth Church to the Brooklyn Historical Society, this upholstered chair has survived more than 150 years of wear and tear. Used in the church for only about twenty years, the original pulpit furniture went into church storage in 1869, not to be rediscovered until 1898. Reporting on the surviving examples of “old Plymouth chairs,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that the chair’s upholstery had deteriorated, but that Plymouth Church congregant Stephen M. Griswold had searched for five weeks to find “plush of the same material and color” to reupholster the chair. Kept by the church as a Beecher relic, the chair came to BHS in 1983 along with an extensive archival collection that sheds light on the complex Beecher story.

Previous efforts to conserve Beecher’s chair stalled because of the need for conservators with expertise in both wood and upholstery. That dual skill set was found in 2019 with Fine Wood Conservation, a Brooklyn-based conservation lab. Broken and missing elements of the chair’s wood mahogany veneer on ash frame have now been consolidated and repaired. Although much of the chair’s original jute stuffing had worn out and needed to be replaced, its red mohair velvet upholstery and springs were salvaged and maintain some of the characteristics of Beecher’s original chair.