Wadsworth-Longfellow House
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Thirty-three-year-old Peleg Wadsworth (maternal grandfather of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) was not a man who gave up easily. He’d only surrendered to British troops after they’d shot him in the arm one winter’s night in 1781 when his Thomaston home had been raided. He gave as good as he got before he surrendered, though.
And now, June 19, 1781, four months after that raid, he was done biding his time as a prisoner of the British. He and a fellow prisoner of war punched through the ceiling of their shared room at Fort George in Castine and crawled out into the stormy June night. After three days of evading search parties by keeping themselves in the woods, they made it to safety. That grit and determination would hold Wadsworth in good stead in his post-Revolutionary life, too, when, beginning in 1785, he became involved in repeated efforts to separate Maine from Massachusetts.
In between Peleg Wadsworth’s revolutionary activities, he somehow found time to build a home, a family, and a business in Portland. That home, the Wadsworth-Longfellow House on Congress Street, survived the city’s Great Fire of 1866, making it the oldest standing brick structure on the Portland peninsula. It was home to three generations of Wadsworth-Longfellows, including the famous poet (see Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). Henry’s youngest sister, Anne, lived in the house until her death in 1901. She bequeathed the property to the Maine Historical Society, which operates it today as a historic house museum and educational space. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark and is open seasonally.
