Photo of the Day: Longfellow House, Cambridge MA

Even approaching this handsome example of Georgian architecture from the Charles River, as I did when I visited and photographed the site nearly a dozen years ago, Longfellow House commands attention.

With works such as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow remains the preeminent poet of American history. But his career extended far beyond these verses practically baked into Americans’ imaginations for the last century and a half, just as use of his house extended beyond even his long life.

Once the specter of COVID-19 fades, I urge readers who visit the Boston metro area to venture over to Cambridge for a stop at Longfellow House. It offers a chance to engage in history across several eras.

That history began well before Longfellow lived here. The home’s formal name, the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, reflects its eight decades even before Longfellow got there.

John Vassall, a wealthy landowner, built the mansion as a colonial example of conspicuous consumption in 1759, only to flee it more than a decade later when his Loyalist sympathies made him persona non grata with neighbors.

Once Vassall left, the house didn’t stay vacant for long. George Washington used it as his headquarters for nine months as he successfully planned to drive the British out of Boston at the start of the American Revolution. (In 1844, Longfellow and his wife Fanny acquired a plaster case of a bust of the general by the French sculptor Houdon.)

Washington’s apothecary general, Andrew Craigie, modified the Brattle Street mansion in the early Federal period of the new republic. His renovations—including a large ell addition on the back of the house, as well as two symmetrical verandas on either side—provided the mansion with the basic structure and footprint it’s had ever since.

Craigie House, as it had become known, came on the market just when Longfellow, who had been renting near Harvard Square, needed a home for the family he was about to start with Fanny. The poet’s father-in-law, Boston industrialist Nathan Appleton, bought it for the young couple.

In this house achieved such fame and prosperity that he became the first American poet who could earn a living entirely on his writing. The seemingly easy grace of his literary style was matched by private contentment, as he and Fanny raised five children here.

All of that was shattered by a fire in 1861, when Fanny accidentally knocked over a candle as she was melting wax to seal locks of her children's hair. The resulting burns took her life and scarred Henry’s face to such an extent that he grew a beard to cover it.

In addition to explaining the domestic life and Henry and Fanny, the tour I took a dozen years ago also recounted colorful details in the lives of the Longfellow children. (One son, Charles, survived a terrible wound while serving in the Union Army in the Civil War, going on to write extensively about his experiences traveling in Asia in the postwar period.)

The house’s website also discusses how the family home was preserved into the 20^th century—notably through the poet’s grandson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, a preservationist, scholar, pacifist and labor activist, who collected objects, photos, correspondence and other items that have helped guides at the house tell its story to succeeding generations of visitors.