Walt Whitman wrote in Greenport home listed for $449,000

Walt Whitman stayed at this Greenport home, which once was owned by his sister, Mary Elizabeth Whitman Van Nostrand.

Listed for $449,000 with Janet Markarian of Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty, the 1,900-square-foot white home is said to have represented for Long Island’s poet a certain kind of “idyllic hearth-and-home living,” according to “The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman” (Routledge, 2011).

Whitman stayed at the home whenever he came to visit his sister and her children, using the house as an inspirational place to write. “Whitman wrote essays about the North Fork from this house,” says Gail Horton of the Stirling Historical Society.

He also was known for his generosity toward his family.

“Periodically, he’d give his sister money to make improvements on the house,” says seller Denise Rathbun. “One of the improvements she made was to put on the porch and add tin walls and tin ceilings in the living room.”

The features are still part of the home today.

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