Gilbert Longfellow

• American

Gilbert Longfellow, a native of Maine and cousin of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was engaged in farming and the lumber business in Roque Bluffs, Maine, near Machias. It is known that he owned an 1856 edition of A Home for All, or the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building written by Orson Squire Fowler, the primary advocate of that style. Shortly thereafter, Longfellow had an octagon house constructed on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. His association with the West began in the early 1890's, when Longfellow accompanied one of his sons who was in ill health to Southern California. Believing the climate would be better for his son's recuperation, he moved the entire family to Pasadena in 1893. He then superintended construction of a second octagon house for his family, repeating the overall design of the earlier structure, although substituting a belvedere for the balustraded roof deck. The design employed by Longfellow - two stories with four large square rooms on each floor, a front and rear entrance, central stairway and chimneys - was one Fowler preferred. It retained, the author noted, "all the peculiarities and advantages of our octagon style, namely compactness and contiguity of rooms, central stairway, closets, and bedrooms and more sunshine in every room. " Longfellow lived in the house until his death in 1912. - NRHP