Homage to 'hero' of divisive novel

WASHINGTON - His life may have inspired the landmark novel Uncle Tom's Cabin but 150 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, Josiah Henson remains a controversial figure, and efforts to turn his onetime home outside Washington into a museum are slow at best.

In Rockville, now a swanky suburb of the US capital, all that remains of the tobacco and wheat plantation where Henson once worked is a wooden house with a small, single-room attachment.

The cabin is not specifically where Henson lived - its construction came long after he left - but it resembles the hut he described in his 1849 autobiography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave.