History
Whittier moved to this house in 1836, where he lived with his mother, aunt, and sister Eliza. Whittier wrote most of his poetry and prose in this house, including his classic "Snow Bound" written in the Garden Room. During his 56 year residence, he enlarged the house several times, raising the original building at the left up and adding another story, then adding the section to the right. Since 1918, the house has been owned and maintained by the Whittier Home Association.
The house and its furnishings essentially unchanged from the poet's death, including living rooms, bedroom, and Whittier's writing study with all its furnishings.
Whittier's birthplace in nearby Haverhill, the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead, is also open to the public.
Read more about this topic: John Greenleaf Whittier House
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)