Alice's study

Alice's Study

When George Washington took over the House for his headquarters in the summer of 1775, this front room became one of his two private chambers. Some sixty years later, Henry W. Longfellow, then a professor at Harvard, rented this room and the one behind it from Elizabeth Craigie. For the next six years this room served as his study and dining room.

A year after Henry and Fanny Longfellow married in 1843, this room became the nursery for the first born child, Charley Longfellow and the other children. From Fanny Longfellow's death in 1861 until 1868, this room served as a classroom for the Longfellow children and some of their friends.

The Longfellows traveled to Europe in 1868 for a year and a half, and upon their return they transformed this room into Edith and Annie Longfellow's bedroom. After Edith and Annie had married and moved out, Alice Longellow began using the room as her study in the 1890s.

I began yesterday {July 4} to read Washington's letters from Cambridge, as yesterday was the date of the first of them. He came to Cambridge July 2, 1775, took command of the army on the 3rd, and wrote his first letter on the 4th. It will be very pleasant to read, here in Headquarters, the letters he wrote sixty-six years ago, perhaps in this very room, -certainly in this very house.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Henry Russell Cleveland, November 27, 1842

Alice's study

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