Table Of Content

From the simplicity of the Longfellow-Hastings Octagon House to the opulence of the William Perry Mansion, the Museum provides a unique look at the lifestyles of the people who contributed so much to the development of modern Los Angeles. Heritage Square Museum explores the settlement and development of Southern California during its first 100 years of statehood through historic restoration and preservation. In 1844, building a sphere was not technologically possible, but the next best shape, an octagon, was.
National Blues Museum
Before George Washington used the main house (Figure 1) as his headquarters, it belonged to Colonel John Vassall, a sugar plantation owner in the West Indies. Vassal purchased the property in 1747 and soon after it was inherited by his son, John Vassall Jr. following his father’s death. The Vassals’ occupied the house until 1774 when they relocated because of their loyalist affiliation. They were Malcom, William, Cuba, Dinah, child James, and two unnamed “small boys”.
Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site breaks visitation record in 2023 - Longfellow ... - National Park Service
Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site breaks visitation record in 2023 - Longfellow ....
Posted: Fri, 23 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
To Do Today: Explore the Historic Longfellow House
Visitors can see the room Washington used as his war council room, where the Continental Army was planned, as well as manuscripts, family papers, furnishings, and clothing belonging to the Longfellow family. Special “deep dive” and family tours are also available at certain times each week. Explore the designed landscape, layered history, and rich museum collections of Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site. For a time, Longfellow's home was one of the most photographed and most recognizable homes in the United States. In the early twentieth century Sears, Roebuck and Company sold scaled-down blueprints of the home so that anyone could build their own version of Longfellow's home.[58] Several replicas of Longfellow's home appear throughout the United States.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The house was his aunt and uncle Abigail and Captain Samuel Stephenson’s home, a three-story Federal style house that stood at the corner of Fore and Hancock Streets in Portland, Maine. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 2, 1982.[1] It is now located at the Heritage Square Museum, its home since the mid-1980s. The introduction of the freeway in the 1960s[12] divided the neighborhood and both the commercial district along Grove Street and the Sacred Heart Parish suffered as the area fell into decline. Today, this commercial corridor has been revitalized with the introduction of several thriving food related business including Grace Street Catering, Café Dejéna, MLK Café, and Arthur Mac's Tap and Snack. Through the early 1900s, North Oakland was a vibrant Italian neighborhood[9] including what is now known as the Longfellow district.
Yu Ming Charter School
Though he published his ideas in books with detailed diagrams, Fowler was only moderately successful in solving America’s housing needs. By the end of the century, slightly more than 1,000 octagons were up, exotic additions to American cities and countrysides. Long before Pete Seeger sang, “Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky,” lamenting the eerie sameness of postwar development, architects and social progressives bemoaned that our houses looked alike. Americans were supposed to be innovators, and yet our homes drifted toward conformity, with designs that didn’t have much to do with how we lived. One such worrier was phrenologist, architect-tinkerer and proto-environmentalist Orson Squire Fowler. This survey included tools such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), electrical resistivity, and conductivity to scan below the ground and see if there were anomalies that might indicate historical features present.
Octagon house in Heritage Square has a multidimensional history
In the meantime, while the Vassalls were still residing in Boston, Cambridge became the main encampment of the Continental Army, thanks to its location directly across the Charles River from Boston. From here, the army laid siege to Boston, confining the British to what was, at the time, a geographically small seaport town on a narrow peninsula in the middle of the harbor. The first home Henry knew was the one where he was born on February 27, 1807 and spent the first few months of his life.
Preserving the LGBTQ Legacy of One of America's Most Historic Homes - Atlas Obscura
Preserving the LGBTQ Legacy of One of America's Most Historic Homes.
Posted: Mon, 26 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Washington and his wife, Martha, lived there until April 1776; Benjamin Franklin and Abigail and John Adams were among their houseguests. The house was sold many times and was moved from 4501 to 4425 North Pasadena Avenue (now Figueroa Street) before being purchased by James G. Hale in 1906. It remained in the Hale Family until it was acquired by the museum in 1970, as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (No. 40). The exterior colors of Hale House were reproduced from chips of the original colors found on the house during restoration. The interior has been restored to represent the rooms as they may have appeared in 1899. A collection of Victorian-era buildings saved from demolition, located on acres of beautifully landscaped grounds just north of Los Angeles, California.
Longfellow Community Library
He and his army would subsequently head south to New York City, to defend it from an anticipated attack by Howe’s army. The remainder of 1776 would prove to be a difficult time for Washington, who suffered a series of defeats in the late summer and fall. These were “the times that try men’s souls,” as Thomas Paine put it, and after his success here in Boston, Washington would not experience another major victory until Trenton in late December. Still, despite these difficulties, Washington maintained the respect of the majority of his soldiers, and his leadership would prove instrumental in the ultimate success of the American Revolution. Washington arrived in Cambridge on July 2, and he initially set up his headquarters at the Wadsworth House, which was the residence of the Harvard president.
In 1969, at the request of the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission, a group of concerned citizens established the Cultural Heritage Foundation to counteract this destruction. The Foundation organized Heritage Square as a last-chance haven for architecturally and historically significant buildings to be moved to, which otherwise would have been demolished at their original locations. That said, the octagon is better off protected at Heritage Square while we become a heritage city with historic sites and buildings preserved together. Fowler followed his own advice and built his family’s 70-foot-high, 100-foot-wide, three-story mega-octagon, visible for miles.
He was a 30-year-old Harvard professor when he moved into a room here in 1837, and he had recently been widowed after the death of his young wife Mary less than two years earlier. These words, penned by Henry Wadsorth Longfellow, aptly describe the history of the palatial Longfellow House. The home was originally constructed in 1759 by John Vassall, a wealthy merchant and ardent British loyalist, who fled to England with his family in 1774 on the eve of revolution. In July 1775, George Washington chose the large and strategically located home to serve as his official wartime headquarters, the irony assuredly lost on the exiled Vassall family. A full-scale replica of the house was built in Great Barrington, Massachusetts at the turn of the 20th century. This building is the only remaining full-scale replica of Longfellow's original home maintaining all the original historical character.
Be sure to leave time to take a walk among the formal gardens, which were designed by Longfellow. The East Lawn is the setting for the Longfellow Summer Arts Festival each week on Sundays from June through August, offering readings and music for families and kids. We depend on ad revenue to craft and curate stories about the world’s hidden wonders. Henry Longfellow's wife was his domestic and literary partner and an astute observer of antebellum American society.
Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site preserves a remarkable Georgian house whose occupants shaped our nation. It was a site of colonial enslavement and community activism, George Washington’s first long-term headquarters of the American Revolution, and the place where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his canon of 19th-century American literature. Evidence of the roots of the name Temescal remain in the Longfellow neighborhood. Temescal Community Garden, the first community garden in Oakland, was established on 47th Street in 1984 [3] and falls within Longfellow’s borders. Temescal Creek, now culverted, runs beneath the rear property line of the garden and ostensibly acts as the physical geography that defines the northern edge of the Longfellow neighborhood.