Stowe was partly inspired to create Uncle Tom's Cabin by the 1849 slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself. Henson, a formerly enslaved black man, had lived and worked on a 3,700 acres (15.0 km2) tobacco plantation in North Bethesda, Maryland, owned by Isaac Riley