UPDATE: this property sold on 4/30/21 for $750,000.
Our Featured Real Estate Listing this week – presented by Monica McMahon, Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate – is a Huntington home connected to Walt Whitman.
This storied, cedar and clapboard colonial home at 85 Chichester Road has an historical marker outside identifying it as the “Home and Burial Site of 2nd Lt. Nathaniel Whitman (1732-1804) of the Huntington Militia during the American Revolution.”
Nathaniel was the grandson of original West Hills settler Joseph Whitman, (who happens to have been Walt Whitman’s great-great-great grandfather).
Nathaniel’s son Daniel lost the house in 1821 when he failed to pay a mortgage of $1400, and the property was sold to the Rome family.
Known locally as the Whitman-Rome House Circa 1705, “this property holds many treasured memories. Walt Whitman trod these rustic paths through West Hills before the lanes were spoiled by the progress of time.Downstairs the house is little changed. The wide old pine-floorboards are the same. Mantles on the four fireplaces range from plain (in the summer kitchen) to elaborate (in the living room). Each door on the main floor is different in design.”
“The house has been modernized without destroying the decor of the past to keep the old and beautiful intact. If walls could talk, they’d have centuries of interesting stories to tell. Included on the the property is a 3 stall modular horse barn.”
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Additional Information
“Walt Whitman visited the family cemetery in 1881,” says listing agent Monica McMahon, of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, “towards the back of the house a path leads up a hill to the burying grounds of the Whitman-Rome families”
According to a walking-tour guide written by Walt Whitman Initiative President, Karen Karbiener, “One identified headstone is that of Experience Rogers, who married Nathaniel Whitman in 1793. Another is that of Walt’s cousin Mahata, daughter of Tredwell Whitman, who was born in the same year as Walt and died December 9, 1842. Past visitors have speculated that the rows of unmarked fieldstones may designate the graves of slaves owned by the Whitmans through the generations. Many of the headstones have now either fallen or are covered with luxuriously leafy vines, giving the place a peaceful aura. When Whitman visited the cemetery on July 29, 1881, the ‘crumbled and broken stones’ put him in a somber mood (as recorded in Specimen Days and as noted by the poet in a letter published in the New York Herald Tribuneon August 4, 1881).”
Click below to access listing price, additional details, and more photos…
Disclaimer: Information is harvested (at time of publication) from publicly available sources and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed – availability, prices, details, and etc are subject to change or withdrawal at any time and for any reason. All dimensions are approximate and have not been verified. All data should be independently verified.
