Headquarters of a Revolution: The 250th Anniversary of Washington’s Arrival in Cambridge

Explore the people, ideas, and questions that shaped General George Washington’s first revolutionary headquarters 250 years ago this July. Choose your path through this free, all-ages event featuring historic house and outdoor walking tours with J.L. Bell; family activities; talks by historians; living historians portraying George Washington (John Koopman), William Lee (Quinton Castle), and Martha Washington (Sandy Spector); Cambridge Open Archives, a Story Walk, and more. 

The house at 105 Brattle Street, now Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, served as Washington’s first military headquarters of the American Revolution from July 1775-March 1776. Headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our country. This event will reveal Cambridge Headquarters as a complex hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, self-emancipated families, and soldiers shaped history.

Scheduled Talks

All talks take place indoors (Carriage House)

10:15 am "Get Ready with Martha," Sandy Spector (living historian, Martha Washington)

Learn all about the clothing of 1775 as Mrs. Washington finishes dressing for her day. There will be some stories and some gossip, too!

An almost-anonymous journal in the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site collection provides a look at daily life in the Continental Army in Cambridge.  Corporal Moses Sleeper spent most of the Siege of Boston encamped and building barracks around Prospect Hill.  His perspective adds to our understanding of the experience of the soldiers under General Washington’s command.

12:30 pm Washington in the Native Northeast, Dr. Ben Pokross

This talk describes George Washington's interactions with Indigenous people while he lived in the Vassall House. Beginning with Washington's experiences as a surveyor in the Ohio River Valley, the presentation will focus on his diplomatic encounters with Abenaki, Haudenosaunee, Passamaquody, and Maliseet peoples, among others, during the Siege of Boston. Although these meetings did not play a crucial role in the conflict, remembering Washington's Indigenous diplomacy reminds us that the early days of the Revolution occurred within the longstanding networks of the Native Northeast. 

Ben Pokross is the former Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, where he researched the site's Indigenous history. In the fall, he will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. 

1:15 pm On Managing a Headquarters that is also a Household, Sandy Spector (living historian, Martha Washington)

2:00 pm Phillis and George: Thoughts on letter-writing, power, and self-representation, Dr. Nicole Aljoe

Nicole N. Aljoe is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Mapping Black London digital project, and Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Her research and teaching focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with specializations on the slave narrative, early novels about race, and digital humanities. Aljoe is the author of multiple books, most recently The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Eighteenth-Century Literature (2024), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince (2025), and The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho (forthcoming). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, Anthurium, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Journal of Early American Literature, and Women’s Studies.

2:45 pm Cambridge's Black Community, 1775, Dr. Caitlin DeAngelis Hopkins

The American Revolution was a time of both possibility and peril for Black residents of Cambridge. Enslaved people used the conflict as an opportunity to pursue their liberty, while simultaneously navigating the threat of separation from their families, deadly epidemics, and violence. In this talk, we will discuss the ways that Black Cantabrigians used the Revolution to advance freedom-seeking strategies that predated the fighting. Some used the upheaval to move far away. Others took jobs at Washington's Headquarters. A few made complex legal arguments to claim pieces of their enslavers' estates. In every case, Black residents used their knowledge and networks to protect themselves and their families.

Scheduled Tours

Neighborhood Walking Tours

10:30 am Children of the Revolution: Boys & Girls in Cambridge during the Siege of Boston, J.L. Bell 

Meet at the mansion’s driveway for a walk around the Tory Row neighborhood and Harvard Square viewing sites and hearing stories of young people caught up in the opening of the Revolutionary War: Loyalists forced from their homes, soldiers in their teens or younger, war refugees, and enslaved children seizing their own liberty.

1:30 pm Cambridge as a Seat of Civil War, J.L. Bell

Meet at the Washington Gate on Cambridge Common. This tour explores how the Cambridge community split on religious, political, and class lines between 1760 and 1775, culminating in a militia uprising in September 1774 and the outbreak of actual war in April 1775. Hear how the wealthy and congenial Tory Row neighborhood fell apart and became a stretch of military barracks and hospitals.

J. L. Bell is the proprietor of the Boston 1775 website, making daily offerings of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the American Revolution in New England. He is the author of a book-length study for the National Park Service about Gen. George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters in 1775 and 1776.

Historic House Tours

11:30 am, 2:30 pm Deep Dive: Headquarters of a Revolution

***

Funded by Eastern National, a non-profit partner of the National Park Service.