Rabindranath Tagore traveled to the west many times before and after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had also sent his son Rathindranath, his son-in-law Nagendra Nath Gangopadhyay and his student Santosh Majumdar to study Agricultural Economics at UIUC.

Later he visited and stayed in Urbana at 508 West High Street (Nov 1912 – Apr 1913) and called it his home, citing it as his permanent address in several of his letters to friends and family.

While in the US he conducted research and collaborated with many scholars. Through his interactions he was learning the western way of building and managing institutional structures of education — gathering knowledge to fulfill his dream of setting up Viswa-Bharati University in Santiniketan, India.

We acquired the house from a private resident in August 2021. It is a small single-family two-story house, built around 1900, on the campus of UIUC.