Distinguished poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) was born in Saginaw and grew up in this house, which was built around 1911 for his parents, Otto and Helen Roethke. Otto's brother Carl lived in the adjacent fieldstone house, and together the brothers managed the William Roethke Floral Company, founded in the 1880s by their father, Wilhelm Roethke, a Prussian immigrant. The company's extensive greenhouses once stood on the land behind the two houses, and Theodore worked in them with his father, experiences that inspired many of his poems. He attended local schools and the University of Michigan, receiving a masters degree in literature in 1936, and later taught at universities throughout the country. Roethke said of his poetry that the greenhouse "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." Drawing on his childhood work in his family's Saginaw floral company, he began in 1941 with Open House to publish extensively, earning a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, two National Book Awards, and many other honors. In 1959, Yale University awarded him the Bollingen Prize. He taught at Michigan State College, at colleges in Pennsylvania and Vermont, and then at the University of Washington at Seattle from 1947 until his death in Washington in 1963. His remains are interred in Saginaw's Oakwood Cemetery.