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RESUMEN

Alice Mary Longfellow (Sept. 22, 1850 – Dec. 7, 1928), philanthropist, historic preservationist, and advocate of women’s higher education, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the eldest surviving daughter of the renowned poet and Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his second wife, Frances Elizabeth Appleton Longfellow. She was raised in the “Craigie House,” the Brattle Street home that had served as General George Washington’s Headquarters during the Revolutionary War and was purchased for her parents as a wedding gift by Alice’s maternal grandfather, Nathan Applegate, a wealthy Boston merchant. (94).

Her childhood coincided with her father’s most successful period as a poet, when he published The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). In 1860, when she was ten years old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized his three daughters in The Children's Hour, a portrait of idyllic New England family life on the eve of the Civil War that became one of his most beloved poems. A popular print that accompanied the poem endeared the angelic, but solemn “Grave Alice” and her younger sisters, “laughing Allegra” and “Edith with golden hair,” to a global audience. That idyll was shattered the following year, however, with the death of their mother, Fanny, in a tragic fire in the family home. As the eldest, aged 11, Alice Longfellow took on a maternal role for her younger siblings and by her teenage years became her father’s hostess, a role that acquainted her with the many well-known visitors from Charles Dickens (who came to Thanksgiving dinner in 1867) to Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as many Harvard faculty members and their families, notably the scientist Louis Agassiz and his wife Elizabeth Agassiz. The experience augmented the formal education she received in private lessons at her home with an English governess and as a student at Miss C.S. Lyman’s School and Professor Williston’s School.

Longfellow’s passion for travel was also encouraged from an early age, with her first trip to Maine with her maternal uncle on his yacht, ‘The Alice’, named in her honor, when she was 12. By the time she was 19 years old, her father’s “darling runaway” had already traveled across eight European nations, and these excursions continued into adulthood enabled by the share of her mother’s estate she inherited at age 21: $131,755.45. With this inheritance, she acquired life-long financial independence that enabled her to live a single life. Perhaps because her younger sisters married that choice was often commented on. A tour guide who passed the famous Longfellow home pointed her out to a group of tourists and pointed out, using a megaphone, that she had “never married.” One biographer notes that “she reportedly was tempted to yell back that this was ‘her own choice.’” (Cronkhite, 13). Recent scholarship has noted correspondence revealing her “intensely close romantic relationship” with Frances “Fanny” Coolidge Stone, in the late 1870s and early 1880s while Stone was the personal secretary for her father, a Massachusetts Congressman in Washington, DC,” a companionship that continued for many decades. (Lowe, 59) Stone, who also never married, was the only non-family member Alice left money to in her will.

In 1878, at the age of 28, she was invited to join what became the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (SCIW) - a group that also included Elizabeth Agassiz, dedicated to advocating for women’s education. In 1882 she became a member of the SCIW executive committee and served as treasurer from 1883 to 1891, when the Harvard Annex as it was known, made classes taught by Harvard professors accessible to women. Alice took several of those classes and also studied for a year at Newnham College in Cambridge, England. The Annex was formally chartered as Radcliffe College, with the right to confer degrees and entrance and instruction standards “equivalent to those of Harvard College” in 1894. (Cronkhite, 11) Longfellow remained active on the Radcliffe Board of Trustees and its Executive Committee until her death in 1928. Throughout her tenure, she donated countless books and supplies to Radcliffe’s first library, created a traveling fellowship for Radcliffe graduates, and paid for the renovation of the first building owned by the young college, Fay House. Early commencement ceremonies for Radcliffe were held in the Longfellow family library and garden.

Another of Longfellow’s passions was historic preservation. Beginning in 1880 she became deeply involved with the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, a group dedicated to preserving George Washington’s home in Virginia, Mount Vernon. Alice dedicated herself, among other projects with the association, to reconstructing George Washington’s book collection and to exploring and highlighting the period in the Revolutionary War when her family home had served as General Washington’s military headquarters.

Longfellow was dedicated to advancing education to those denied it, to giving them a chance to stand on their own feet in this difficult world,” as she wrote about her efforts at Radcliffe. In 1887, Longfellow was elected to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, School Board where she served until 1892, at a time of reform efforts to expand education to immigrant groups led by reformers such as Pauline Agassiz Shaw, daughter of Elizabeth Agassiz. She also provided scholarship funds for students at historically black colleges, including Hampton Institute and the Tuskegee Institute, and also encouraged education for the blind and for Native Americans. In 1900 Longfellow spoke of her immense pride at being adopted as an honorary member of the Ojibwe first nation in recognition of her father’s famous poem, “The Song of Hiawatha” which is set near Lake Superior and draws on characters and legends that Kahge-ga-gah-bowh, an Ojibwe leader, told Henry Longfellow on visits to his Cambridge home. (Hiawatha, however, was an Iroquois name Longfellow mistakenly believed was synonymous with Nanabozho, a trickster figure in Ojibwe folk tradition).

It was thus natural, given her connections to Radcliffe and to greater educational opportunities that Alice Longfellow donated $100 to the Harvard Summer School for Cuban teachers that was held in July and August 1900, just before she left for Canada for the ceremony to welcome her as an honorary member of the Ojibwe. Because her father’s poetry was revered throughout the Spanish-speaking world—and because of H.W. Longfellow’s writing and scholarship as Harvard’s Smith Professor of French and Spanish—many of the Cuban teachers saw it as a highlight of their visit to visit the “Casa de Longfellow” as Harvard librarian William Coolidge Lane, recorded it. Lane wrote in his diary that a group of the Cubans invited to the Longfellow home “were in raptures over everything and Miss Longfellow showed us many interesting cosas, and they could scarcely believe that they were in the very house where the Poeta had lived and written.” (Lane Diary). “Miss Longfellow,” the Cambridge Tribune reported, “is always glad to receive the Cubans and takes considerable pleasure in showing them about the old historic rooms. Not a few of the teachers are familiar with the poems of Longfellow, and the visits are thus the more pleasant.” (Some Cuban Notes)

Grace Gulick, daughter of Alice Gordon Gulick, dean of women for the Cuban Summer School, recalled the teachers’ intense pleasure on hearing Alice read selections from her father's poems, a view echoed by Elijah Clarence Hills, director of the English classes, who noted the teachers’ love of literature, and especially recited poetry. Alice Longfellow was also among the small group of women, including Gulick, Ellen Derby Peabody Eliot (wife of Harvard President, Charles W. Eliot, who received the visitors the Summer School’s official reception in Hemenway gymnasium attended by 2000 people, half of them Cuban. She also joined the Eliots, Mrs Gulick, and Mrs. Theodore Brooks, in hosting a lunch in honor of the Harvard, Radcliffe, and Wellesley women chaperones for the teachers. The next day the two Alices, Gulick and Longfellow, endured torrential rain showers to personally say farewell to the Cubans departing Massachusetts from Charlestown.

In 1913 Alice and her siblings established the Longfellow House Trust to preserve their family home as a memorial to both Henry Longfellow and George Washington. The home was taken over by the National Park Service in 1972 and became the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site in 2010. In her final years Longfellow was also a frequent donor to World War I relief funds, a member of the association of Daughters of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the National Geographic Society. In 1927 she was formally received by the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini in Rome, and presented him with a signed copy of her father’s translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

The following year, on December 7, 1928, Alice Longfellow died in the same family home into which she was born and which she had devoted so much of her life to preserving for future generations. She was 78 years old. In 1930 Longfellow Hall was dedicated in her honor as Radcliffe’s first proper lecture hall. It later became part of the Graduate School of Education.

Further Reading

Alice Mary Longfellow (1850-1928) Papers, 1855-1965 are maintained at the Longfellow House - Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1. Cronkhite, Bernice Brown. “Grave Alice,” Radcliffe Quarterly 49, no. 4 (November 1965): 11-14.

2. “Cubans Embark on Homeward Journey,” Cambridge Chronicle, 18 August 1900.

3. Lamberton, L. Jill. “‘A Revelation and a Delight’: Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing,” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 65, No. 4 (June 2014): 560-587.

4. Lowe, Hilary Iris. “The Queerest House in Cambridge,” The Public Historian, Vol. 41, No. 2, May 2019: 44-69.

5. “Some Cuban Notes,” Cambridge Tribune, July 21, 1900.

6. William Coolidge Lane Diary.

7. Obituary: New York Times, Dec. 8, 1928.