Longfellow National Historic Site

Longfellow National Historic Site review

George Washington made this pretty, 28-room mansion his Continental Army headquarters from 1775 to 1776, before following the war front further south. In 1837 it became a boarding house, and a young Harvard professor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, moved in. When he married, his bride's father gave it to him as a wedding present, and he stayed until his death in 1882. In between entertaining such literary luminaries as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Dickens, Longfellow composed many of his best-known works here.