One sunny Sunday morning in Brooklyn Heights, you may have spotted a young woman posing a small stuffed doll of a man in front of various sites around town and snapping cellphone shots of him.

That would be my daughter.

A perfectly normal college student who works at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Conn., during school breaks, Sophie has developed an admittedly eccentric obsession with Harriet’s younger brother Henry Ward Beecher. (We’re trying not to worry too much about her.)

If you go: Brooklyn Heights

Beecher was the charismatic 19th-century preacher whose dramatic abolitionist sermons and mock slave auctions did at least as much to lead to the freeing of the slaves as his sister’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” He delivered his sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where he was summoned in 1847 to lead the fledgling congregation.

Folks came from all over the world to hear him, with as many as 3,000 people cramming into the church when he preached. He was like a rock star. He’s considerably less famous today, but he still holds enough historical sway that there’s a stuffed-doll version of him on the market. A sympathetic friend of Sophie’s gave her one; she’s perhaps inordinately fond of it.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Beecher’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, for which he fervently pressed. So we Hugets decided to pay homage to “The Great Divine” by visiting his spiritual home base in leafy, brownstone-lined Brooklyn Heights.

Our first Beecher sighting was in Columbus Park, where a big honkin’ statue of the man, wearing his enormous signature coat, looms. He looked old and grumpy to me. But seeing this statue was about as close as Sophie’s ever going to get to meeting her idol. The way she squealed and ran toward him, you’d have thought that she was a preteen who’d spotted Justin Bieber.

Sophie and her doll posed for pictures. Then we meandered over to Plymouth Church, where a different statue (created by Gutzon Borglum, who also sculpted Mount Rushmore) showed a younger, happier-looking Beecher. I was starting to see the appeal. Beecher’s heavy-lidded eyes, lank hair and teddy-bear build are oddly alluring. For a dead dude, I mean.

We took more pictures, then went inside for the 10 a.m. service. Sophie was happy to hold in her hands a copy of the revolutionary Beecher hymnal, the first to present music and lyrics together rather than as separate elements. Beecher designed it that way, to make it easier for the congregation to sing along.

A young seminary student delivered the sermon that day; a congregant later told me that this, plus the mid-summerness of the day, probably accounted for the low turnout that morning. Sophie was surprised that so few people were there. She thinks that Beecher, or his legacy, deserves better. I think she’d imagined being part of an enthusiastic, swooning crowd, stirred up by Beecher-like preachifying.

Well, that didn’t happen. But after the service, Sophie mounted the pulpit and stood right where Beecher himself had once stood. The Beecher doll posed there, too.