Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.
Alice’s efforts fused the story of George Washington with the memory of her father, whose popular writings like The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and “Paul Revere’s Ride” helped define American identity from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth. Alice was two decades older than her cousin, William Sumner Appleton, Jr. Like Fanny, Sumner was raised in the Appleton family’s treasure-filled home on Beacon Hill. After graduating from Harvard, he worked in real estate, acquiring skills that prepared him for his yet unknown mission. That crystallized during his trip to Europe, where he saw carefully preserved historic places. His passion took shape in 1910 he when founded the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England). In his first Bulletin to members, rallying supporters to the cause, he wrote, “Our New England antiquities are fast disappearing because no society has made their preservation its exclusive object.” His new organization, with his cousin Alice Longfellow serving as officer from the outset, would do exactly that. As the organization grew and began acquiring properties, people everywhere appealed to Sumner for help. In 1925, Lucy D. Thompson of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, wrote to warn him that the town intended to demolish two eighteenthcentury Georgian mansions in order to build a new central high school. Sumner responded, “My feelings are wholly in favor of the Gold-Plunkett and Kellogg properties,” both of which had “sufficient interest from an educational, historical, artistic and even commercial point of view.” If the houses could not be kept in place, Pittsfield should “provide sufficient ground so the architect of the new high school will 16
Historic New England Summer 2014
make his plans to combine these two beautiful houses in an attractive scheme with his new school building. The two old houses should be moved only just enough to allow place for the high school.” Sumner wrote, “What makes a city desirable as a place of business or residence is the sum total of its attractive features. It is not any one schoolhouse, or library or museum or church. It is the sum total of all these.” He cited two eastern Massachusetts precedents. The City of Boston had granted use of the Old State House to the Bostonian Society, “on the condition that it maintain there a museum, open free to the public.” The Town of Reading, Massachusetts, had proposed purchasing the 1694 Parker Tavern and a few acres of ground for a park. Though no park was realized, Reading did acquire the old house for its Antiquarian Society “on the condition that the society should repair and restore the house and use it as an historical and patriotic memorial, a museum of antiquities open free to the public.” Sumner did not mention to his Pittsfield correspondent that the mansion he called “the Gold-Plunkett” house was Elm Knoll, the birthplace of his grandfather Nathan’s first wife, Maria. Rather than allude to his family connection, he added the Longfellow name to the property. Pragmatically, he wrote, “Pittsfield’s leading citizens should be able to raise money from all over the state...based on the established position that Longfellow has acquired with the public in general.” A Western Massachusetts Longfellow House was “in every way worthy as the other three already existing: Portland, [Maine’s] Wadsworth Longfellow House, Sudbury, [Massachusetts’s] The Wayside Inn, and Craigie-Longfellow in Cambridge.” Sumner justified using the Longfellow name because Elm Knoll’s tall clock had inspired the poet’s popular poem “The Old Clock on the Stairs.” Inaccurately, he claimed that the Longfellows “frequently came here to the home of [Fanny’s] maternal grandparents” and that “Mrs. Longfellow’s mother and father were frequently at many gatherings at which Longfellow was present and which must have been held under this roof.” Actually, by the time Fanny first brought Henry here in 1843, en route to Catskill Mountain House on their honeymoon, neither her mother nor her maternal grandparents were alive. I see in Sumner’s use of the Longfellow name for Elm Knoll his pride in being related by marriage to the celebrated poet. To him, Henry and Fanny were the preservers of Washington’s house and were his American models for historic preservation. Alice Longfellow had also become a men-