Longfellow home replica built in other Portland

Great poets used to get a lot more respect. When a commission was asked to pick a building to represent the Pine Tree State at The Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Ore., in 1905, it chose to erect a replica of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s three-story birthplace in Portland, Maine.

Longfellow was considered one of the greatest poets in the English-speaking world. There was hardly a schoolchild then who couldn’t recite a few lines from “The Wreck of the Hesperus” or “A Psalm of Life.” Even today a multitude of phrases penned by the bard, such as “ships that pass in the night” and “into each life some rain must fall,” enrich conversations of people who have never heard of the poet.

Not everyone was happy with this choice, however, and among them were the professional naysayers at the Bangor Daily News. To fully assess the opposition, one has to understand that Bangoreans had a long-standing complex about Portland as they struggled to carve out a similarly vibrant metropolis on the Penobscot. They were also concerned about the “brain drain” that caused farmhands and store clerks, perhaps even poets, to flee Eastern Maine every time the price of lumber dropped or someone shouted “Gold!”

“We are not blaming Longfellow for having been born in Portland, for he could not help it. We are blaming Portland for trying to have Maine pay for the glorification of a man who escaped from the state as soon as he could, and seldom came back. Haven’t we poets enough who were born in Maine and have lived in Maine ever since?” asked an editorial writer on Feb. 24, 1905.

This paste-pot philosopher continued, “We have asked and pleaded to have our boys and girls stay at home and grow up on the farm, until they were big enough to hold office. The idea of jumping Longfellow over the heads of Holman Day and Colonel Dill and John T. Chase and other writers of verse is not acting right by local talent.”

It’s hard to tell whether this is a serious statement, so much of what appeared in the newspapers back then being written with tongue in cheek. I am not familiar with Dill or Chase, but Holman Francis Day is a different matter. He was once a writer of huge popularity. Our parents and grandparents read with relish his poems and novels such as “King Spruce” and “Clothes Make the Pirate.”

What person with a drop of Maine blood in his veins could forget an immortal line such as “A billion of spruce, and all hell let loose, when the Allagash Drive goes through.” My father never could, and I heard him recite that line and others from Day’s works many times.

But only someone who had gotten into the hard cider would argue that Holman Day was any match for the bard of Portland or Cambridge or wherever when it came to versifying. My abridged Bartlett’s devotes nearly three pages to Longfellow and only two lines to Day. Longfellow’s bust still sits in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, while poor Day lay in an unmarked grave in Vassalboro for more than a decade until his classmates at Colby College raised enough money to provide a stone.

The replica of the Portland, Maine, house was up and open by mid-August. It served as a gathering place for people with Maine interests including the 27,000 former Mainers living along the Pacific Coast.

Over the front door was an inscription saying it had been the birthplace of “America’s greatest poet.” The popular “Poet of the Sierras,” Joaquin Miller, certainly seemed to certify this dictum when he stated at a ceremony at the house that when he had visited England 30 years before, people there had told him Longfellow was more popular than Alfred Lord Tennyson, the much celebrated bard of monumental Victorian sentiments.

Near the building was a replica of Lincoln’s birthplace, which served as the Illinois building, and a few hundred yards away a reproduction of Scottish poet Robert Burns’ “mean and pinched” birthplace, according to a story written specially for the BDN that appeared on Aug. 17.

Back in Maine, it was stated, Longfellow’s early home was set at that late date “in the midst of rather prosaic surroundings” including big warehouses blocking the view of the ocean. The retired sea captain who owned it had converted it to apartments. “Think of a poet’s birthplace turned into a tenement!” the horrified BDN correspondent exclaimed.

On the last day of that same month, the city’s other daily newspaper, the Bangor Daily Commercial, ran a photograph of the reproduction of the birth house, purportedly showing Miller in the crowd out front. The paper also ran an editorial calling the house an ideal Maine building and explaining the project was being funded, not by the state, but by private donations.

That fact left the BDN with little to editorialize about. And if its editorial writer had been able to forecast the future, he might have thought better of his original commentary. Holman Day spent the last decade of his life in California making movies for Hollywood, about as far from King Spruce as he could get.

As for Longfellow’s birthplace, at Fore and Hancock streets, the infant poet lived there only briefly before moving to the brick house on Congress Street that today is associated with his youth. The birthplace was torn down in 1955, an insult far worse than having been turned into a tenement. As for the reproduction built in Portland, Ore., that also seems to have been lost to the sands of time.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his epic 19th century poem “The Song of Hiawatha” are the focus of the Maine Historical Society’s annual Longfellow Forum 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 15, at the society’s headquarters at 489 Congress St. in Portland. Alan Trachtenberg, professor emeritus of English and American studies at Yale Univeristy, is the keynote speaker. For more information, call 774-1822 or visit www.mainehistory.org.