Georgian Mansion with a Story

A stately yellow house with a past as impressive as its façade stands in Cambridge Massachusetts. Two tiers of windows accentuate the breadth of the home, while white pilasters with scrolled capitals add verticality and ornamentation to the building. A pediment enclosing a semicircular window crowns the front of the house, and two yellow chimneys stand sentinel atop the gently sloping gray roof.

At just over 250 years old, the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House at Longfellow National Historic Site tells many stories. Its most famous long-term resident is the 19th-century poet and scholar Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In this home he penned such iconic works as The Village Blacksmith, Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and Paul Revere’s Ride.

Longfellow’s story, however, is only one of the many within the walls of this 18th-century, mid-Georgian mansion. In July 1775, George Washington took over the Vassall House as his first major headquarters of the American Revolution and stayed until April 1776.
Learn the names of even more historic figures—statesmen, soldiers, poets, and more—who visited, or resided in, the butter-colored mansion. Their stories intersect at this handsome building—the centerpiece of a national park that also boasts a colonial revival garden with manicured hedges and bright blooms.

Unable to visit Longfellow National Historic Site? Take an online virtual tour of the Longfellow House and Gardens. View the historic rooms, as well as selected objects and archives from the museum collections. There is a brochure on Longfellow National Historic Site’s toy collection. In addition, there is a gallery of Longfellow family photographs from the collection of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes.
[Photos: National Park Service]