Over the summer we visited the Longfellow House in Cambridge, near Harvard Square. My boyfriend wanted to go, and kept mentioning it for months, so on a Sunday afternoon we finally walked over and caught the last tour of the day, at 4pm. The tour was free and excellent, and there was no cost for admission. I highly recommend it!

The property is administered by the National Park Service and is officially designated the “Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site“. The Ranger who led our tour explained the two famous histories of the home: how it housed General George Washington, from 1775 to 1776, and later the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family, from 1837 to 1950. It was interesting to view the house simultaneously as a military command center and the home of a prominent American family.

Cambridge is littered with historical sites and artifacts from the Revolutionary War, from buildings to cannons to routes once ridden. Walking home through Cambridge Common, we passed a tall stone plaque with the engraving, “Under this tree Washington first took command of the American Army. July 3, 1775”. It’s a proud history that still feels salient in New England, even a little fresh. In California, my home state, it’s not really on people’s minds. It’s interesting to experience that heritage here.

Everyone loved the tour, which lasted about an hour and was over too soon. There were maybe 15 people in our group; most were non-Cambridge residents, by a show of hands, and all were adults. Our guide was superb: friendly, well rehearsed, and super knowledgeable about the history of the house, the objects in it, and its former inhabitants. She knew the answer to almost every question (including “How old is that piano?”) and was just as quick to say when she didn’t.

The house had been carefully preserved by Longfellow’s descendants, starting in 1913, and by the National Park Service, after his family donated it in 1972. Everything inside was either an original or a reproduction except for the electricity, lighting, and heating, which were added by the National Park Service. We weren’t allowed to touch anything, not surprisingly, except the banister on the old stairs, and that only for safety. Unfortunately, we were also unable to see the house’s facade and the front yard, which were temporarily blocked off. The original stone steps leading up to the front door had become unsafe and were being replaced.

Selected stories

The tour covered so many things that I can’t remember everything, but here are some of the stories that were most memorable to me. (I have added details beyond what I can remember from the tour, to fill in some of the gaps and provide more context.)

We learned how George Washington (1732-1799) arrived in Cambridge in 1775, and how he might have been influenced by living here for nine months. The Continental Congress had amassed a force to defend the colonies against the British, and they dispatched Washington to Cambridge to lead it. The house had recently been vacated by its original inhabitants, a prominent Tory family who fled to England fearing violence, which is how the Continental Army came by it.

Washington, however, who was a wealthy southern gentleman and a veteran professional soldier, was privately appalled by the New Englanders under his command, who seemed to him impossibly rough and undisciplined. Despite secret misgivings, he succeeded in driving out the Redcoats, thereby ending the Siege of Boston. Importantly, by coming to Cambridge, Washington was obliged to live and work with a variety of the colonists, not only with Virginians or rich landowners, before he became responsible for leading all of the United States as president.

The tour briefly touched on the subject of slavery. Washington, who owned many slaves, was not happy to discover black soldiers in the Continental Army, but apparently he dealt with it. Our guide also shared an anecdote involving a young black boy who was hanging around the house one day. Washington, needing someone to run an errand, noticed the boy and said something along the lines of “You there! Go do such-and-such for me.” The boy was miffed that Washington expected him to work for free, while Washington could hardly believe that the boy expected to be paid. Then there was the famous poet Phillis Wheatley, a former slave who lived in Boston and wrote to Washington. They corresponded, but I don’t think he ever met her. I wonder what it meant to him.

Sixty years later, in 1837, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) moved into the house as a boarder to be near his new professorship at Harvard. (The house was already famous for its role during the Revolutionary War, but one of Washington’s officers had bought it and died deep in debt, leaving his widow to rent rooms in order to make ends meet.) Then, in 1843, Longfellow married Fanny Appleton, and her father bought the house for the couple as a wedding gift.

Longfellow became the most famous American writer of his time. So famous that he actually became rich from his writings. He even became a role model and father figure, a part of the national culture and consciousness. Journalists detailed his home life, and readers ate it up. It’s hard to imagine anyone becoming rich and famous from poetry today, although I guess there was Dr. Seuss, and later Shel Silverstein; and songwriting can be lucrative, of course. Longfellow is a little like John F. Kennedy, in the way people relished his private life and wanted to be like him, and was equally patrician, but less glamorous, and also less amorous.

We learned about Frances “Fanny” Longfellow (1817-1861), Henry’s wife. (Actually, Fanny was his second wife. He had married once before, but that wife had died from a miscarriage soon afterward.) Fanny had grown up with vast privileges, as her father was an industrialist and a congressman, but she had also experienced terrible loss; her mother and two of her siblings had died before she turned 19. In addition to being highly educated and widely traveled, Fanny was smart and talented. She was also independent, and resisted Henry’s courtship for seven years, until she agreed suddenly and enthusiastically to marry him. Henry was completely taken with her.

Four days before their eighteenth wedding anniversary, Fanny’s dress caught fire in an accident, and she died from her injuries at the age of 43. For me, during the tour, that was horrible to imagine. I take it for granted that if such a thing had happened today, Fanny would almost certainly have survived. For his part, Henry never fully recovered from her death. Afterward he raised their five children, ages five to fourteen, as a single parent. (There had been one other child, but she had died in infancy.) He did not marry again.

We also learned a little about Longfellow’s descendants, including his oldest child Charley, his daughter Alice, and his grandson Harry Dana.

As a teenager, Charles “Charley” Longfellow (1844-1893) ran off to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He managed to survive both malaria and a nearly fatal back wound, and then spent the rest of his life yachting and traveling the world. For a time he lived in Japan and sent many artworks back to the house, several of which we saw during the tour. He was also plastered with tattoos, and supposedly succeeded in concealing them from his father. He never bought a home or married.

Alice Longfellow (1850-1928) never married, either, and lived in the house her whole life. As an adult, she dedicated a great deal of time, effort, and money to support education, especially for women, blacks, Native Americans, and the blind. She also traveled extensively. Ultimately it was she who led the charge to preserve the house as a historical site and a monument to her father.

Henry “Harry” Wadsworth Longfellow Dana (1881-1950) was a scholar and a teacher. He had witnessed the outbreak of World War I while traveling in Germany, and in 1917 he was fired from his teaching post at Columbia University for pacifist views. (He was also gay, and must have suffered for it.) He returned to Cambridge and moved into the house with his aunt Alice. From there he began working to preserve his families’ legacies by collecting and organizing their artifacts. Our tour guide gave Alice and Harry most of the credit for preserving Longfellow’s estate.

Planning your visit

The tour was much more engaging than this review. The Ranger did a wonderful job of relating the inhabitants’ stories through the physical experience of being in the house: through the architecture, the layout, the rooms, the objects, the location, and even the views from the windows. She seemed to know the story of every table, every painting, every modification that was ever made to the house.

As I write this, the Longfellow House is “closed to general visitation for the season”. However, I highly recommend visiting and am including some notes to help you plan. Everything listed below is free and open to the public!

• The house is open for “general visitation” from May through October, Wednesday through Sunday from 9:30am to 5pm, with guided tours starting on the hour. (That’s only half the year… Is that a New England thing?)
• During the summer there are Family Saturdays at the house from 12pm to 4pm, with hands-on activities for visitors of all ages.
• In September 2018, the National Park Service hosted special themed tours on Fridays at 6:30pm “to share the lesser-known stories of the house”, such as Fanny’s friendship with Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the famous abolitionist.
• In October and November 2018, on select Thursday evenings, the Fall Lecture Series invites visitors to learn about various topics in art and history, such as the demographics of the British soldiers whom Washington drove out of Boston in 1776.

Let me know if you go, and what you think!