Henry Wadsworth Longfellow birthplace, Portland, 1896
Item 4122 info
Maine Historical Society
Longfellow's parents spent the winter of 1807 at the home of his father's sister, Abigail, while her husband, Capt. Samuel Stephenson, a shipmaster, was at sea.
The house, which faced the harbor, stood on Fore Street, then a fashionable part of Portland.
In later years the house where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born was a tenement occupied by Irish families.
During that period, it is said a Portland schoolteacher asked her class, "Can you tell me where the poet Longfellow was born?"
A small boy answered, "Yes'm, in Patsy Connor's bedroom."
The house was torn down in 1955.
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