Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House

Jill's Journal: The girls and I headed to nearby Concord today – what a beautiful town. The stately, historic houses had me swooning at every turn. Our destination, however, was the home where Louisa May Alcott wrote “Little Women” in 1868. I remember absolutely loving that book as a little girl and look forward to our girls enjoying it someday soon. The tale of four sisters was loosely based on Alcott’s childhood and the setting for the book took place in this home, called Orchard House. The other people on the tour had fun with our girls, saying it made the house feel more authentic to them to have sisters underfoot. I’ve never been asked so many times if we were planning to add a fourth daughter to the mix!

The Alcotts lived in the home from 1858 to 1877. Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott, borrowed money from his close friend, who just happened to be the renowned author Ralph Waldo Emerson, to finance the home. The house actually started as two: a manor house and a tenant house, both built circa 1690-1720. Alcott’s father and his buddy (who just happened to be another renowned author, Henry David Thoreau) lifted up the tenant house on logs and melded it to the manor house to increase the size.

Orchard House has about 80% original furnishings, so it looks very similar to the way it did when the Alcotts lived here and is like stepping into the pages of the storybook. The small built-in desk in Louisa’s room, where it’s believed she wrote “Little Women,” is still intact. Do you see those two upstairs windows on the right? Her desk was built in between those windows. At 300 years old, the house is in some disrepair and the tour guide mentioned that they just try to keep it pieced together as it was not the most well-built home of its time.

Pictures were not allowed inside, but it was lovely and comfortable. Not fancy and not Spartan – somewhere around what middle class must have been at the time. One interesting note: one of the daughters was an artist and got private art lessons in the house along with another aspiring artist named Daniel Chester French. A sculpture in the house of the Alcott patriarch was done by French, whose later, more famous works include the seated Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Literally next door to the Alcott home is Wayside, which was actually the Alcott’s first home in Concord. They sold it to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose “The Scarlett Letter” is still required reading in high school literature classes, when they moved briefly to Boston. Hmmmm…Concord is not a large town, but it is a beautiful one, and it’s stunning to realize a huge percentage of America’s greatest literaries -- Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson (whom Alcott confessed to having a crush on in her journals), and Henry David Thoreau – were all living here at the same time and were in the same circle. There must have been something in the water!