The Wadsworth-Longfellow house is shown behind an empty street and sidewalk in about 1961. Peleg Wadsworth and his wife Elizabeth Bartlett Wadsworth built the house in 1785-1786 and raised their family there.

When the Wadsworths moved to a farm in Hiram in 1807, their daughter Zilpah and her husband, Stephen Longfellow, moved into the house. The couple raised their children in the house and remained there until their deaths.

Their daughter Anne Longfellow Pierce, a widow, lived in the house until her death in 1901, when she gave it to the Maine Historical Society.