Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site

Summary: The house is beautiful and a must-see for fans of Longfellow; the tour guide is a necessary evil - the price to be paid/endured for access to the house.

The house and gardens are exquisite. The tour provides unprecedented access to the personal belongings, spaces, and artwork of the Longfellow family. In this regard, the tour is amazing. One could spend hours soaking it all in... if not for the constraints of the tour guide.

The standard tour lasts for about an hour. Our guide was friendly and knowledgeable. If he had stuck to answering questions, it would have been an amazing experience.

Instead, he went off on tangential monologues focused on topics that had little to do with the reasons that most people travel to a house made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. For example, the guide went out of his way to discuss and name (several times) the enslaved people who had been in the house long before its namesake (an ardent abolitionist) lived there. He made a lengthy biographical outline of one of these slaves, while only giving scant attention to Longfellow's own children.

One exception that he made was to shoehorn in a modern interpretation of the personal correspondence of one of Longfellow's daughters that concludes that she was a lesbian because she had a close female friend. He also dedicated some of the precious time of to tour to discuss a grandson that was reportedly gay. This discussion of the sex lives of minor characters in the Longfellow story were given in a way that was very much inappropriate for my children that were on the tour.

He made sure to mention that Longfellow benefited from slavery because his father in law who gifted him the house had made his money in industry supported by slavery, exposing his sins while extolling the virtues of his allegedly LGBT descendants.

He dedicated little time to Longfellow's relationship with his wife, and the role of his wife as his companion and editor. He said little about his dedication to his children, the tragedy of losing his wife, and the Christian faith that led him to pen poems such as "Christmas Bells." In fact, Longfellow's Christianity was completely ignored - apparently not a story worth telling, regardless of its importance to the author. So many other parts of the story of Longfellow's life were ignored so that the park ranger could share his personal agenda. There was comparatively little time to discuss and ask questions about the artifacts in the house and how they related to Longfellow's life and works. In this regard it was a huge disappointment.

I do recommend the tour, but just know that you will have to listen to biased tangents that are propagandistic in their elevation of popular, culturally privileged agendas at the cost of telling the complete story.