Longfellow house to reopen after painstaking restoration

PORTLAND – After 21/2 years of restorations, visitors soon will get their first look at the newly overhauled Wadsworth-Longfellow House, the boyhood home of 19th century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The federal-style home underwent painstaking renovations to give visitors an idea of what the house looked like in 1850. The Maine Historical Society will hold an open house from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.

Longfellow was born in 1807 in Portland, where he is honored as a native son.

Built in 1785 and 1786 by the poet’s grandfather, the house now serves as a memorial to his famous grandson. The three-story brick house is a National Historic Landmark.

The goal was to recreate what the house looked like in the early 1850s, said Laura Fecych Sprague, curator of the restoration.

Though Longfellow had moved out by then and his parents had died, he was a frequent visitor to the family homestead, where his sister Anne and his Aunt Lucia continued to live.

The renovations actually began in 1997 with research into the period and detective work as to what might have existed underneath later coats of paint. New sheets of wallpaper were produced, sometimes digitally, from remnants of borders and colorful, highly patterned fragments that existed behind coats of paint and wooden beams.

While the wallpaper designs in various rooms are replete with hanging vines, diamond patterns, bouquets and stripes, the effect is eye-popping, yet aesthetically pleasing, according to Sprague, because the colors fall within a range of complementary earth tones.

The physical work was completed over a 21/2-year period and cost about $650,000. According to Sprague, almost every interior surface of the house is original to 1785, but things such as the plaster needed repair and buttressing so that “when the wallpaper went on, it would be solid.”

Sprague thinks the change visitors are most likely to notice is the floor coverings throughout the house. There are wall-to-wall wool carpets based on 19th century patterns and flat, plain weave sisal that substitutes for the Chinese straw matting that was popular in the 1800s.

A collection of the family’s American paintings and decorative arts, cleaned and polished to show their original beauty, all serve to bring to life the Longfellow family’s history and its preferences.

“When you take something with 100 years of dirt on it and clean it up, you realize that’s all you have to do,” Sprague said. “I think we’ve been pretty successful.”

The festivities Saturday will include a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 11 a.m., followed by a recitation of poetry, a museum exhibition and Victorian games for children between noon and 1 p.m. Cake and lemonade will be provided.

More poetry readings and Victorian crafts for children will take place between 1 and 3 p.m. and the house will continue to be open to the public until 4 p.m. A donation of $1 is suggested.