Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site

Historic site in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The home was used as a temporary hospital in the days after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. General George Washington, Commander in Chief of the newly formed Continental Army, initially used the Benjamin Wadsworth House at Harvard College as his headquarters, but he decided that he needed more space for his staff; he moved into the Vassall House on July 16, 1775, and used it as his headquarters and home until he departed on April 4, 1776. During the Siege of Boston, he found the view of the Charles River from the house particularly useful. The home was shared with several aides de camp, including colonel Robert H. Harrison. Washington was visited at the house by John Adams and Abigail Adams, Benedict Arnold, Henry Knox, and Nathanael Greene. It was in this house that Washington received a poem written by Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet. "If you should ever come to Cambridge", he wrote to her, "I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses". Martha Washington joined her husband in December 1775 and stayed until March 1776. The Washingtons also had several servants, including a tailor named Giles Alexander, and several slaves including "Billy" Lee. and 217 bottles of Madeira wine purchased in a two week period. Nathaniel Tracy had made a great fortune as one of the earliest and most successful privateers under Washington, and he owned the house from 1781 to 1786. He then went bankrupt and sold it to Thomas Russell, a wealthy Boston merchant who occupied it until 1791.

Andrew Craigie had been the first Apothecary General of the American army, and bought the house in 1791. He hosted Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn in the ballroom; Prince Edward was the father of Queen Victoria. Craigie married Elizabeth while living in the house; she was the daughter of a Nantucket clergyman and only 22 years old, 17 years younger than he. most often people connected to nearby Harvard University. Short term residents of the home included Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, and Joseph Emerson Worcester. Sparks moved into the home in April 1833 while he was preparing a biography of Washington based on original documents. He recorded in his journal: "It is a singular circumstance that, while I am engaged in preparing for the press the letters of General Washington which he wrote at Cambridge after taking command of the American army, I should occupy the same rooms that he did at that time." Another lodger was Sarah Lowell, an aunt of James Russell Lowell. Longfellow moved to Cambridge to take a job at Harvard College as Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres, and rented rooms on the second floor of the home beginning in the summer of 1837. Longfellow's new landlady had earned a reputation for being eccentric The rooms that he rented were the same ones once used personally by George Washington while it was his headquarters, His landlady, Elizabeth Craigie, died in 1841.

Joseph Emerson Worcester leased the property from Elizabeth Craigie's heirs after her death, and he rented the eastern half to Longfellow. Nathan Appleton purchased the house in 1843 for $10,000; Longfellow married his daughter Frances, so Appleton gave him the house as a wedding gift. Longfellow was proud of the connection to Washington and purchased a bust of him in 1844, a copy of the sculpture by Jean Antoine Houdon. Longfellow lived in the house for the next four decades, producing many of his most famous poems including "Paul Revere's Ride" and "The Village Blacksmith", as well as longer works such as Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. He and his wife most often referred to it as "Craigie House" or "Craigie Castle". Longfellow oversaw the creation of a formal garden, and his wife oversaw decorating the interior. She purchased several items from Tiffany & Co. in New York, as well as $350 worth of carpets. They installed central heating in 1850 and gaslight in 1853. Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil also visited the house privately and requested the company of Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell. The couple also raised their three daughters and two sons in the home. Longfellow often wrote in his first floor study, formerly Washington's office, surrounded by portraits of his friends, including charcoal portraits by Eastman Johnson of Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Cornelius Conway Felton. He would write at the center table, at the desk, or in the armchair by the fire. but he was burned on his own face and was scarred badly enough that he began growing a beard to hide it.

Longfellow died in 1882 and his daughter Alice Longfellow was the last of his children to live in the home. In 1913, the surviving Longfellow children established the Longfellow House Trust to preserve the home as well as its view to the Charles River. Their intention was to preserve the home as a memorial to Longfellow and Washington and to showcase the property as a "prime example of Georgian architecture". The home was already becoming famous during the poet's lifetime as it was often printed alongside his works, in chromolitographs, and in gift cards. Its fame continued to grow after Longfellow's death. By the 1890s, a company began manufacturing postcards and selling them in bulk for teachers to give away. In 1962, the trust successfully lobbied for the house to become a national historic landmark. In 1972, the Trust donated the property to the National Park Service and it became the Longfellow National Historic Site and open to the public as a house museum. Everything on display was owned by the Longfellow family. The site was renamed to Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site on December 22, 2010, to ensure that the connection to Washington was not lost in the memory of the general public. The site also possesses some 750,000 original documents relevant to the former occupants of the home. These archives are open to scholarly research by appointment. Across the street from the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site is the municipal park known as Longfellow Park. In the middle sits a memorial by sculptor Daniel Chester French dedicated in 1914. In addition to a bust of the poet, a carved bas relief by Henry Bacon depicts the famous characters Miles Standish, Sandalphon, the village blacksmith, the Spanish student, Evangeline, and Hiawatha. In 1994, locals established the Friends of the Longfellow House, a nonprofit organization which raises funds to supplement federal support for the site and to assist with ongoing preservation projects.

According to the National Park Service, Longfellow House's museum collection and archives include "a rich and varied collection of artifacts and archival materials", including "[f]ine arts, decorative arts, furnishings, books, textiles and clothing, toys, tools, Asian art and artifacts, and more."

The original 1759 house was built in the Georgian architectural style. This facade configuration effectively expressed the rising prosperity and status of John Vassall's family background. The lyre shape proved impractical and a new design was made with the help of a landscape architect named Richard Dolben in 1847. The new design was a square surrounding a circle that was cut into four tear shaped garden beds outlined by trimmed boxwood. Mrs. Longfellow referred to the shape as a "Persian rug". After her father's death in 1882, Alice Longfellow commissioned two of America's first female landscape architects, Martha Brookes Hutcheson and Ellen Biddle Shipman, to redesign the formal garden in the Colonial Revival style. The garden was recently restored by an organization called Friends of the Longfellow House, which completed the final stage of its reconstruction, the historic pergola, in 2008.

For a time, Longfellow's home was one of the most photographed and most recognizable homes in the United States. In the early twentieth century Sears, Roebuck and Company sold scaled down blueprints of the home so that anyone could build their own version of Longfellow's home. Several replicas of Longfellow's home appear throughout the United States. One replica, simply called Longfellow House, still exists in Minneapolis. Originally built by businessman Robert "Fish" Jones, it currently serves as an information center for the Minneapolis Park System and is on the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway. A full scale replica of the house was built in Great Barrington, Massachusetts at the turn of the 20th century. This building is the only remaining full scale replica of Longfellow's original home maintaining all the original historical character. There is also a replica in Aberdeen, South Dakota on Main Street.