The Longfellow House

By Natalie Rothstein
He was a young 30-year-old professor about to start his teaching career at Harvard. So it was that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow knocked at the door of 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA to see the widow Craigie about a room to rent. The year was 1837. Longfellow became a boarder in the house that he would eventually own and where he would live for the rest of his life, until his death in 1882 at age 75.
Today, of course, hardly anyone refers to the stately Georgian mansion by any other appellation than that of The Longfellow House. But it did have an honored history before ...