The Walt Whitman House, built in 1848 in Camden, N.J., was the only house the poet ever owned. He lived there for 19 years, until his death in 1892. (New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry, Walt Whitman House, Camden, N.J.)

Visitors to the Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J., often have the place to themselves. Curator Leo Blake is the sole employee of the six-room house, doing the lonely job of giving a few tours each week. Last summer, strapped for funds, he decided to paint the house's exterior himself. "I wasn't told to do it," Blake says, "but this building doesn't take care of itself."

At Whitman's 70th birthday dinner, a guest predicted that Whitman's grave in Harleigh Cemetery would make Camden "known to the world from the fact of one man living and dying here." That hope—that Camden would become famous and prosperous because of Whitman—has not yet come to pass.

Like Whitman (1819-1892), Camden has been trying for more than 100 years to draw more people—and a stronger economic base—to his house, which became a National Historic Landmark in 1963. This fall, the house sponsored a "Falling Leaves Tour" to celebrate the autumn years of Whitman's life: the 19 years he spent in the wood-frame Greek revival house, built in 1848. In April, the house will mark the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass by displaying a newly restored first edition of the Whitman's famous work in conjunction with a conference, "Walt Whitman and Place," to be held at Rutgers University-Camden.

"It's important for people to have a physical connection to history, no matter the site," says Blake, a park ranger for the state's division of parks and forestry, which administers the house. Not many people make that connection, however: Fewer than 4,000 tourists visit the house each year. The most common remark from those that do make it is, "What was Whitman doing here?"

That question—Why was Whitman in Camden?—has been asked since 1884, when it was just Walt's house, not the Walt Whitman House. Whitman, who initially moved to Camden in 1873 to live with his brother George and his ailing mother, purchased the modest two-story row house on Mickle Street for $1,750 in 1883, after his mother had died and George had moved to Burlington, N.J. Always on the verge of destitution, Whitman managed to use some royalties to buy the house, the only one he ever owned.

"Whitman was not a wealthy artist," says Tyler Hoffman, professor of English at Rutgers-Camden and a member of the Walt Whitman Association Board, "He lived in what was then a working-class seaport."

Whitman's parlor (New Jersey Division of Parks and Recreation, Walt Whitman House, Camden, N.J.)

Whitman received many visitors there, including Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Dickens. Some of their reactions were unsettlingly similar to those of contemporary visitors: They couldn't figure out why Whitman lived in Camden, which was then, as it is now, a depressed pocket of urban decay overshadowed by Philadelphia, its neighbor across the Delaware River. In 1892, Elbert Hubbard called Camden a "great, sandy, monotonous waste of straggling buildings."

Visitors to Mickle Street (now Mickle Boulevard) no longer encounter a teeming, dirty, noisy neighborhood. Today, the block is aggressively empty and austere, a victim of failed urban renewal. A county jail looms across the street from the Whitman House.

In contrast to the foreboding concrete buildings nearby, the modest house retains much of its 19th-century character: cobblestones remain on the parking strip in front of the house, which offers visitors a tour of a rarely preserved period style: small, dank rooms brightened by whimsical, often clashing wallpaper and rugs. By a stroke of literary luck, the Walt Whitman House has become one of a handful of historically preserved 19th-century working-class houses. "If this weren't Walt Whitman's house, it wouldn't be here," says Margaret O'Neil, a former curator.

Journalists rarely ventured to houses like these on blocks like Mickle Street, so those who went to Walt's house for interviews were often taken aback. Theodore Wolfe, in his 1895 Literary Shrines: The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors, wrote that "the dingy little two-storied domicile is so disappointingly different from what we were expecting to see that the confirmatory testimony of the name 'W. Whitman' upon the door-plate is needed to convince us that this is the oft-mentioned 'neat and comfortable' dwelling of one of the world's celebrities." When Hubbard visited in 1883, disconcerted, at the "plain, weather-beaten house" Whitman explained, "I like the folks, the plain, ignorant, unpretentious folks; and the youngsters that come and slide on my cellar-door."

Whitman's preference for living with "the folks" seems apt, given his reputation as the bard of the working-class and champion of democracy. But Whitman was hardly sentimental. To Horace Traubel, who chronicled the poet's final days in With Walt Whitman in Camden, Whitman remarked, "It is always painful to come back into … the stinking reeking streets-Mickle Street-sluttish gutters-women with hair a-flying-dust brooms clouding the streets-confinement-the air shot off. Oh!"

Camden never recovered from an economic slump that predates Whitman's time; both the city and its historic house have long struggled economically. In 1946, a Whitman collector offered to donate a large cache of manuscripts and papers to the city if it would build a library to house it, but the city turned down the collector's offer.

In 1975, Franklin Roberts, a Broadway producer and poetry lover, founded the Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center in Camden. He wanted a "central facility for the world's poets" and chose the city partly because of its ties to Whitman. Today, the center holds frequent poetry readings and other events.

Still, the Walt Whitman House was temporarily closed for lack of funds in 1990. Two years later, the city council rejected a proposal to add a plaza, café, and bookstore to the house. But the house underwent a year-long, $850,000 restoration, completed in 1999. Camden, too, has created successful tourist attractions in the past decade, including the nearby New Jersey State Aquarium and has encouraged rehabilitations of historic structures like the RCA building. The Whitman House has seen a slight increase in visitors as a result.

Fans of Whitman might find it fitting that the house is understaffed and under-funded. After all, Whitman was always poor and struggling. But Whitman wouldn't want us to sit back and savor the poetic irony. He'd want us to get up and go to Camden for a visit.

Anne Trubeck is an associate professor of English at Oberlin College.

This story was originally published on Preservation Online on Dec. 3, 2004.

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