Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site

This guide to the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Boston follows a horse-chestnut tree on Brattle Street that inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's most-memorized poem, and what happened when the city widened the street in 1876 and cut the tree down. You'll hear how Cambridge schoolchildren refused to let the wood become firewood, and what a local furniture maker was hired to build from it. The same rooms once served as George Washington's headquarters during the siege of Boston, a century before Longfellow ever lived here.