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Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site is a
small unit of the National Park Service. It is a two hundred and sixty year old
home that has seen all of American history. It's been the headquarters of
George Washington when he was learning how to be a leader and the family home
of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Not only is this a place where George Washington
came and really created the Continental Army - the physical tool with which the
revolution was executed but then 60 years after Washington, Longfellow comes
here and it's within these walls where he develops these epic poems that sort of
become an American mythology and start to point to a real American culture.
The opportunity to take these two American icons -
George Washington, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - off their pedestals and
deconstruct them and start to understand them as real people is one of the most
powerful things that we offer to visitors here. This is a place that you
can have a unique experience at even if you just visit one time. Most of the
time if I get a person in the house to experience a house tour, they can connect
to something here. There's something for everyone. But that's not the only way
that you can connect with the site. We also host art events here, we do concerts
and poetry readings, in the hope that it will remain a creative space for the community.
Warrior Writers' connection to the Longfellow house happened about five
years ago and we thought that it would be a really great space to come and
gather in the springtime. We eventually started doing regular workshops
throughout the spring and then doing a reading in the summer on the lawn,
sharing our works with the public in order to help bridge the gap between
veterans and civilians.
This place is also a treasure trove for those who are looking for answers, whether you're writing a book,
doing research. And it may not be that you came here for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or
the family's letters themselves, but they reflected on everything from when they
were here, so we have those resources for people to use.
The scholarship at the Longfellow house is is possible
because of the way the occupants have collected the family papers with great care and concern,
and that now have been cataloged by the Longfellow House staff.
The museum collections are just wonderful -
they're all mostly original to the Longfellow family and some other
residents in the house. [clock chiming]
There's furniture, paintings, sculpture, books, and then of
course collections like clothing, toys, and collections like Charley Longfellow's
Japanese things. It's an amazing collection of items.
In addition we have an archive collection of over three quarters of a million individual pieces
of paper, which touch on almost every topic you can think of going from 17th
and 18th century up to early 20th century topics and those are primarily
all Longfellow related extended family pieces: correspondence, journals, photo
albums, and all kinds of other ephemera.
So visitors arriving at the Longfellow
house will see what's really a very symmetrical landscape in front of the
house and that's a reflection of the architecture of the house itself as you
move to either side and towards the back of the property, visitors will find
Colonial Revival garden which was designed between 1904 and 1925 by two of
the most prominent women Landscape Architects in our country,
Martha Brooks Hutcheson and Ellen Biddle Shipman. And they were commissioned by
Longfellow's daughter, Alice Longfellow, to design a garden that was colonial in
motive. So not a true colonial garden, but something that hearkened to the earlier
history of the site.
It's a very important piece of history but it's also a
wonderful gathering place for people to come
I know so many people who just come and enjoy the garden, sit there and spent a
nice afternoon reading a book or painting.
And while this grand Georgian house
was once the place of Washington and Longfellow and home to families,
servants, and enslaved people, as a unit of the National Park System this now
belongs to all of us. As public land this is a place to visit, to learn, to enjoy,
and ultimately to spark inspiration in your own life.
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