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If you have an interest in American History and Literature and your future travel plans include a trip to Southern Maine, keep reading this Blog.
Congress Street is Portland’s “Main Street,” the peninsula’s primary east-west
commercial and transportation axis. Where State Street intersects Congress Street,
there is a statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
If you proceed east on Congress Street for a couple of miles you will find the Wadsworth Longfellow House.
Most children are introduced to Longfellow’s wonderful poem, “The Midnight Ride of
Paul Revere,” in elementary school. I know that was the case for me. But Longfellow had other connections to American History and Literature.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his brother Stephen Longfellow temporarily rented rooms at the at the Titcomb House while students at nearby Bowdoin College before moving into what is now the campus’s Maine Hall by the fall of 1823.
Twenty-seven years later, Calvin Ellis Stowe, hired to teach at Bowdoin College, moved into Titcomb house with his wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was in this house that Harriet Beecher Stowe penned her masterpiece, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The house was subsequently renamed Harriet Beecher Stowe House.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attended Bowdoin
College—both class of 1825—at the same time as Franklin Pierce, who was a year
ahead of them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpieces include The Scarlet Letter and the House of Seven Gables. Pierce must have considered Hawthorne a good writer as he asked him to write a campaign biography for him, which Hawthorne did. Pierce won the 1852 election and became the 14th President of the United States.
Longfellow maintained a friendship with Hawthorne. When Hawthorne died in 1864.
Pierce was at this side. Longfellow was a pallbearer at the funeral, along with Louisa
May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and others.
When Franklin Pierce died in 1869, Longfellow was not invited to be a pallbearer at the funeral.
On August 22, 1879, a female admirer traveled to Longfellow’s house in Cambridge
and, unaware to whom she was speaking, asked him: “Is this the house where
Longfellow was born?” He told her that it was not.
The visitor then asked if he had died here. “Not yet,” he replied. Longfellow died in 1882.
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Sources
1. Information on Congress Street taken from: ”Greater Portland Landmarks”.
2. Information on The Wadsworth Longfellow House taken from the Maine Historical
Society.
3. Information on the Longfellow brothers’ rental of rooms at the Titcomb house taken
from Wikipedia, Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Brunswick, Maine).
4. Information on Calvin Ellis Stowe and Harriet Beecher Sowe Taken from Wikipedia,
Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Brunswick, Maine).
5. Information on the Longfellow, Hawthorne being classmates and Pierce being one
year behind at Bowdoin taken from Lapham’s Quarterly.
6. Information on Hawthorne’s campaign biography, taken from the New England
Historical Society.
7. Information on the pallbearers at Hawthorne funeral taken from History Lives.
8. Information on the pallbearers at Pierce’s funeral taken from Mental Floss.
9. Information on Longfellow’s death taken from Best Poems Encyclopedia.