Anne Longfellow Pierce (1810-1901) was the fourth of eight children of Zilpah Wadsworth and Stephen Longfellow. In 1832, she married George Washington Pierce, a Bowdoin College graduate, lawyer, and promising Democratic political figure.

George Pierce died in 1835 of typhus and Anne Pierce moved back into her family home on Congress Street in Portland, where she lived the rest of her life.

She bequeathed the house to the Maine Historical Society as a memorial to her brother, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and specified that the society build its headquarters on the property.