House Tour Offers Glimpse Into The Past Walt Whitman's Summer Home.... - Laurel Springs, NJ
N 39° 49.271 W 075° 00.155
18S E 499778 N 4407910
The summer home from 1876 to 1882 of poet Walt Whitman, at 315 E. Maple Ave., was built in 1785. At that time, the home was called the Stafford Farm House. The name has since been changed to the Whitman-Stafford House.
Waymark Code: WMGP85
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 03/27/2013
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Every so often, tours are given of some of our county's oldest and most historical homes. This article speaks of that tour and the history of this house. The Whitman Stafford Farmhouse is located at 315 Maple Avenue in Laurel Springs, NJ, on the corner of Stone Road and Maple Avenue, a few blocks off the White Horse Pike. The house was built facing Stone Road, then Clementon Road. Today's modern mailing system has given it a number on Maple Avenue, a street which did not exist when the farm encompassed eighty-five acres all the way to Laurel Lake.
The original farmhouse was built prior to 1785 with three floors and two rooms per floor. behind it is an addition which local history attributes to the 1880s. The farmhouse is not so remarkable except for its age. It is quite ordinary as was the period taste for such structures; it is made of wood and clapboard. If anything, the home is reminiscent of the Georgian style of architecture given its order and symmetry. Given Quakers and their philosophy dominated the area at the time of this building's construction, it is not surprising how simple it is despite other homes in city areas which were much more ostentatious.
As already indicated this was the summer home of Walt Whitman. Much of “Specimen Days” and parts of “Leaves of Grass” were written here. Between 1876 and 1884, poet Walt Whitman spent summers in his later life at a friend’s farm house a few blocks from Laurel Lake in Laurel Springs, Camden County, New Jersey. Whitman converted one of the barn buildings into his summer home. Whitman said that Laurel Lake was the “prettiest lake in either America or Europe”. He would walk to Crystal Spring near the lake. He would sit by the spring, drink the water, and take mud baths near the spring to help his recovery after a partial stroke.
There is an historical marker on the property which reads: Whitman-Stafford House; 1785; Whitman’s Summer Home; 1876-1881; A pleasant house parts of it, quite old with maple and lilac bushes growing in the yard.