17. Longfellow Dollhouse

Washington native Dr. Eugene LeMerle spent two years making this dollhouse as a 1912 Christmas gift for his seven-year-old daughter Eugenie. It was donated in 1998 by Eugenie Riggs, the original recipient, who moved to Ashton in 1945, bringing this 18^th-cenury-style dollhouse to another 18^th-century house, “Cherry Grove,” which she and her husband restored.

The dollhouse is modeled after the 1759 Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now the Longfellow House Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. Constructed for royalist John Vassal, who left during the Revolutionary War, it was used by General George Washington as his headquarters during the 1775-1776 siege of Boston. Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rented rooms in the house from Mrs. Andrew Craigie, wife of Washington’s Apothecary General, from 1837 until the house was purchased as a wedding gift from his father-in-law in 1843. Longfellow lived in the house until his death in 1882.

Mrs. Riggs said that the original dollhouse furnishings provided by her father had been “too clumsy and big and not suitable for the house,” so later in life she began collecting scale furniture in the late Federal style of the 1820s. She could find no suitable beds. She once noted that “men seem to be more interested in this house than women,” possibly because of the craftsmanship.

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