Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9402030009
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOCELYN McCLURG THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. LENGTH: Long
Who doesn't remember Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's rhythmic cadences, immortalizing the ``hurrying hoof-beats'' as Paul Revere rode to warn the townsfolk of Lexington and Concord that the British were coming?
During his lifetime, Longfellow (1807-1882) was ``America's poet,'' achieving immense popularity and fame with his romantic vision of the nation's past. ``The Song of Hiawatha,'' ``The Courtship of Miles Standish,'' ``The Village Blacksmith,'' ``Paul Revere's Ride'' and other poems made Longfellow a giant during the 19th century, but his reputation has declined during a more cynical age.
At the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Mass., Longfellow remains a living legend. His large, impressive home on a quiet part of Brattle Street is preserved as though the poet had just gone out for a walk to nearby Harvard Square.
The handsome mustard structure was built in 1759 by Maj. John Vassall, a wealthy young Royalist. History buffs will be impressed to learn that George Washington slept here - for 10 months in 1775 and 1776, while using the house as his headquarters as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.
By the early 1800s, a widow named Elizabeth Craigie owned the house, and she rented rooms to Harvard students and other lodgers. Longfellow, recently appointed professor of modern languages at Harvard, became one of Craigie's lodgers in 1837. He would live in the house the rest of his life.
Longfellow's young first wife, Mary, had died on a trip to Europe in 1835. In 1843 Longfellow married Frances ``Fanny'' Appleton of Boston, and her father purchased Craigie's house for the couple (the widow had died in 1841). The Longfellows had six children, and the poet's descendants were dedicated to keeping the house as it was during Longfellow's lifetime.
The historic site is maintained by the National Park Service, which takes visitors on informative tours. Filled with the heavy furnishings and decorative flourishes of the Victorian age, the house also has a notable collection of portraits and photographs, both of family members and such Longfellow friends as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Longfellow's study is the most intriguing room in the house; it has been left as it was at the time of his death in 1882. Ornately carved oak bookcases are crammed with his books; items such as the quill pen and ink-stands he used sit on his folding writing desk. Take note of the armchair made from the wood of the ``spreading chestnut tree'' Longfellow wrote of in ``The Village Blacksmith.'' Cambridge schoolchildren presented the chair to Longfellow on his 72nd birthday in 1879.
In the library, the sunniest room in the house, the darkest tragedy to befall the Longfellow family occurred in 1861. Fanny Longfellow, the poet's wife, was in the library when she dropped burning wax or a match on her summer dress, which went up in flames. Longfellow was in his study, writes biographer Newton Arvin, and rushed in to throw a rug around his wife, but it was too late to save her. She died the next day. Longfellow was grief-stricken, but eventually he went on to write some of his most famous works, including ``Tales of a Wayside Inn.''
Harvard Square, with its myriad bookstores, is an appealing place for a literary excursion. A stroll away down Brattle Street is the house where our most famous 19th-century poet wrote his best-known works, forging an enduring, if sometimes mythical, portrait of early America.
Salem, Mass., has carved a thriving small-town tourist industry out of its two claims to fame: witches and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Hawthorne (1804-1864) left Salem embittered - forced out of his Custom House job for political reasons - but nearly 150 years later, his hometown seems to have forgotten or forgiven the writer's angry departure.
There's a statue of the author of ``The Scarlet Letter'' on Hawthorne Boulevard and his moniker graces the Hawthorne Hotel. But the main Hawthorne attraction in town is the House of the Seven Gables, the seven-gabled, spooky 1668 mansion that inspired Hawthorne's 1851 Gothic romance of the same name.
Salem has created a small complex on the House of the Seven Gables site that includes a cafe, a gift shop, a garden, several early houses and Hawthorne's birthplace - a modest barn-red house (circa 1750) that was moved from Union Street.
Hawthorne was born Hathorne, and it has been speculated that he changed the spelling of his name to distance himself from his ancestors, one of whom, Col. John Hathorne, was a judge at the notorious Salem witch trials in the 1690s. According to family legend, one of the victims placed a curse on the judge and his descendants before she was executed on Gallow's Hill, writes Hawthorne biographer James R. Mellow.
This tasty piece of family gossip was the inspiration for ``The House of the Seven Gables,'' which tells the story of the Pyncheon family, whose unfortunate present-day descendants are haunted by a curse placed on their ancestor, Col. Pyncheon, a witness at the witch trial of Matthew Maule, whose property the colonel coveted. Hawthorne used the many-gabled house, owned at the time by his cousin Susannah Ingersoll (and where he never lived), as the setting for his novel.
Tour guides are quick to point out allusions to the novel, such as Hepzibah's Cent Shop, a room arranged to look like the penny shop that the spinster Hepzibah Pyncheon unhappily runs in ``The House of the Seven Gables.'' (The young guide on our tour twice called ``The House of the Seven Gables'' a ``boring'' book. If you haven't read this classic, I suggest waiting until after you've visited the house. It's more fun to imagine Hepzibah and poor Clifford haunting these old rooms after you've seen them.)
Even if you'd rather read John Grisham than Nathaniel Hawthorne, the House of the Seven Gables and Hawthorne's birthplace are interesting historically and architecturally. Both are filled with outstanding collections of early American antiques.
Hawthorne buffs should stop by the stately Custom House (its official name is the Salem Maritime National Historic Site) on Derby Street, where the writer was surveyor of the port of Salem from 1846-1849. Hawthorne was forced out after the Democrats lost the national election to the Whigs. The writer/surveyor's pen and inkwell and his walking stick are on display.
If you journey to Salem, take time to visit some of the town's witch-related museums. The kitschy but entertaining Salem Witch Museum provides a dramatic rendering of the witch hysteria. You'll come away with a better understanding of why Salem's shame haunted one of America's greatest writers two centuries later.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***