The Wadsworth-Longfellow House was built by Peleg Wadsworth in 1785-1786. Peleg was a veteran of the Revolutionary War looking for a new life in Maine. After the house was finished, Peleg and Elizabeth moved their family of 6 children into the home where they would have four more sons. Eventually Peleg and Elizabeth would move to Wadsworth Hall which Peleg also built (in Hiram) in 1795. Here, their son Charles oversaw farming and lumbering operations. Elizabeth passed away in 1825, Peleg in 1829. Zilpah, the Wadsworth's oldest daughter had married Stephen Longfellow of Gorham in 1804 in the parlor of her family home. It was in this home that the famous poet Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow grew up.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in 1807, the second of eight children. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. He taught French, Italian, and Spanish at Bowdoin in 1829, married Mary Potter of Portland, started teaching at Harvard in 1834, and lost his wife in 1835. When he returned to Harvard in 1836, he really began his literary career. He married Frances Appleton in 1843 and raised their children in Cambridge. According to the Maine Historical Society, "Longfellow also influenced America's artistic and popular culture. His works inspired artists and composers, and his poems were read and recited not only in parlors and schoolrooms, but also at civic ceremonies. Schools, geographic locations, and ordinary products, even cigars, were named for him and for characters from his poems. In the 1870s, schoolchildren celebrated his birthday as if it were a national holiday." His childhood home would go to his sister, Anne Longfellow Pierce who was widowed at a young age and therefore willed the house to the Maine Historical Society after her death in 1901. The house is still open to the public today with almost all of the same artifacts that were present in the house when the family lived there.
The last photo was taken in 1904.
When I visited the house on December 10th around 3 in the afternoon, there weren't many people around. People would walk by without really looking at the house which I found remarkable. The house is squeezed between two very modern buildings and looks strange and very out of place among one of Portland's busiest streets. I didn't get the chance to go inside and look but I have been inside before on school trip's. It's like walking straight into the past when you get to explore the inside of the home and it really is an insight into history. I didn't know much about Longfellow before I wrote this blog (Thanks Maine Memory for all the great info!) but I could still appreciate how cool it was to be able to see something so old and know it was a part of his history.
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