George Washington ran the Siege of Boston from the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is the Vassall‑Craigie‑Longfellow House, a place whose walls remember plantation wealth, war, poetry, and family life. The house was built in 1759 for Jamaican plantation owner John Vassall Jr., who fled the Cambridge area at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War because of his loyalty to the king of England.
Nearly two decades later, George Washington occupied this very house as his headquarters beginning on July 16, 1775, using it as his base of operations during the Siege of Boston until he moved out on April 4, 1776. In 1791 Andrew Craigie bought the house and instigated its only major addition; when Craigie died in 1819 his widow Elizabeth took in boarders. One of those boarders would become central to the house’s later life: the noted American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who made it his home for almost 50 years.
Until December 2010 the site was simply called Longfellow National Historic Site, and its full historic name still links Vassall, Craigie, and Longfellow together. Picture George Washington directing the Siege of Boston from these very rooms until he moved out in April 1776.