The Wadsworth-Longfellow House
Near Portland, Maine
The three-story brick building at four eighty-nine Congress Street is the oldest standing brick residence in Portland, and it carries two histories at once. The first belongs to General Peleg Wadsworth, a Revolutionary War officer who built the house in seventeen eighty-five and seventeen eighty-six. It was the first wholly brick dwelling on the Portland peninsula, a statement of permanence in a city that had burned to the ground about a decade earlier during the British bombardment of seventeen seventy-five.
The second history belongs to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was born in Portland on February twenty-seventh, eighteen oh seven, and grew up in this house. His mother was a Wadsworth, and the family moved into the brick home when Henry was only eight months old. He would spend most of the next three and a half decades here, and the house shaped him as profoundly as any school or library. The elm-shaded garden, the ships visible from the upper windows, the smell of salt air off the harbor, all of it wove its way into his verse.
Longfellow went on to become the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century. His narrative poems, including Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha and Paul Revere's Ride, reached readers across Europe as well as the United States. When he visited England in eighteen sixty-eight, Oxford and Cambridge both awarded him honorary degrees on the same visit, an honor previously given to no American.
His sister Anne lived in the Congress Street house her entire life and refused to let it be altered. When she died in nineteen oh one, her will transferred the house and most of its original furnishings to the Maine Historical Society, making it one of the earliest author house museums in the United States. The family's furniture, china, and portraits remain where they were placed.
