GW Slept Here (Honest!)

George Washington slept in so many houses that one has the impression that he was taken to houses to sleep in them for the sake of posterity. However, when I first came to America in the late Thirties, I lived for a while in two of the houses where George Washington really had slept, a fact that at the time impressed others far more than me. One is usually hazy about the history of a country one did not learn as a child; furthermore, I had never met any Americans until I was old enough to take summer courses at the University of Geneva. I remember very well one of the American boys talking about Cambridge as being near Boston—when I perfectly well knew that they were by no means close together: I had never heard of the American cities, and assumed he was talking about England.

I came to the Washington-slept-in houses through the man I was then married to. He was a direct descendant of Nathan Appleton, who had died in 1861 (if memory serves me) as the richest man in Boston, thanks to his stake in the New England textile industry. Nathan Appleton’s daughter Fanny had married Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and had received the Craigie House on Brattle Street in Cambridge as a wedding present. George Washington had indeed slept here, and here we too slept for several months—thanks to the generosity of the Danas, direct descendants of Longfellow, who took pity on us because we were poor and needed a place to stay.

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Nika Hazelton

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George Washington slept in so many houses that one has the impression that he was taken to houses to sleep in them for the sake of posterity. However, when I first came to America in the late Thirties, I lived for a while in two of the houses where George Washington really had slept, a fact that at the time impressed others far more than me. One is usually hazy about the history of a country one did not learn as a child; furthermore, I had never met any Americans until I was old enough to take summer courses at the University of Geneva. I remember very well one of the American boys talking about Cambridge as being near Boston—when I perfectly well knew that they were by no means close together: I had never heard of the American cities, and assumed he was talking about England.

I came to the Washington-slept-in houses through the man I was then married to. He was a direct descendant of Nathan Appleton, who had died in 1861 (if memory serves me) as the richest man in Boston, thanks to his stake in the New England textile industry. Nathan Appleton’s daughter Fanny had married Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and had received the Craigie House on Brattle Street in Cambridge as a wedding present. George Washington had indeed slept here, and here we too slept for several months—thanks to the generosity of the Danas, direct descendants of Longfellow, who took pity on us because we were poor and needed a place to stay.