We were coming to visit Boston, but I didn’t know how much I’d fall in love with Lexington and Concord. This was both Hannah and my favorite day! It was just magical. In Boston you see old mixed in with the new. But in Lexington and Concord there were parts that felt like we stepped back in time. It was peaceful and quiet and absolutely beautiful.
Orchard House
Out of everywhere we visited, this and Old Manse were both Hannah and my favorites. The Orchard House actually made me cry!! Haha, and I’m not embarrassed to say it. We have traveled all over the US and in other countries going through historical homes. Little Women is a story about Louisa’s life and her families. There are some parts that have been changed, but also many accurate stories. Knowing the story of Little Women and Louisa May Alcott, and then walking through the home where 85% of the items inside are originals and seeing the stories in Little Women displayed from her real life in this home, it was so wonderful.
We were not allowed to take photographs inside. But inside we saw the room where Amy (May in real life) drew art she had seen in Emerson’s home on the walls of her bedroom as she was trying to become an artist…and then paintings after she had toured Europe and improved her art so well she was displayed in salons in Paris. While growing up the Alcott’s did not have a lot of money so Mays drawing are scratched on walls and moldings with pencil, carved into fire-boards, she burned Raphael into cutting boards…her art is found hidden all over the house.
We saw the living room where the girls acted out their plays and real photographs and costumes they had from those days. We saw the dress that Louisa sewed for her sister Anna (Meg) in the home. I could go on…But to hear the stories, and see how Bronson and Abby raised their girls, it was amazing. I loved every second of being there. Our tour guide was passionate about the Alcott’s, and the home was authentic. It was a wonderful tour.
Other interesting facts we learned. May’s (Amy’s) husband was 14 years younger than she was. They both fudged their ages on their marriage certificate so they didn’t look like their ages were to different.
They have letters from Louisa who refers to the money she makes and sends home as the ‘Alcott sinking fund’ because of how bad her father was with money. She refers to her dad in her letters as a dreamer.
Louis felt a lot of pressure to make money and take care of her family. And unlike in the book when the ‘Little Women’s’ father comes home from war sick. It was actually Louisa who went to war and came home sick. She dealt with the effects of being sick and bad health care for the rest of her life. Because she had days when she was sick and days when she felt better, she worked very hard on her healthy days. Louisa taught herself to write with both her left and right hand so on healthy days when her right hand got tired she could keep writing with her left. She worked hard… and we were very surprised after being in Mark Twain’s ostentatious home, to see this humble home and learn that Louisa ended up making more money than Mark Twain at the end of her life.
One of the neat displays in the home was a bookshelf where people from all over the world, that were touched by the writings of Louisa May Alcott, sent a copy of a ‘Little Women’ book in their own language. It was amazing to see how far reaching the simple story about her family touched so many lives.
It was also amazing to see how so many famous people merged into this area. Henry David Thoreau (naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher ) was close friends with the family and actually drew their land plot. Drawings of Mays (Amy in the book) were drawn from art she saw when visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet ) home. May died after childbirth. That is not mentioned in Little Women, but it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who came to their home with the telegraph to tell the family what had happened. The families were so close that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and the Alcott’s where all buried next to each other. Later on in the day we went to visit their grave sites.
As a book lover, I had to pull the tour guide aside and ask her what her favorite books were on Bronson and Louisa. She said the book they use the most as a reference in their tours is ‘Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father’. The Orchard House gave the author full access to all the letters and documents they had to write this book. I am reading it right now, and thoroughly enjoying it. Another book she recommended was ‘Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interview & Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates.’
I’m kind of at a loss for words to say why I loved Orchard house and why it made me cry. There are probably prettier settings, although the area is very beautiful. There are definitely grander homes. But to be in the Orchard house and feel all the love, and all the creative and intentional ways that Bronson and Abby tried to raise their family, it was inspiring.
The Old Manse Home
From the Revolutionary War to the revolution in American thought under its roof, The Old Manse was the center of Concord’s political, literary, and social zeitgeist for a century.
(from the Old Manse website)
Manse is an old-fashioned word used to describe a minister’s home. The home was constructed for patriot minister William Emerson. The upstairs overlooks the North Bridge, where the famous battle of April 19, 1775, took place. Later, some of New England’s most esteemed minds found inspiration inside its walls. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson (grandson to William Emerson) and Nathaniel Hawthorne both called the Manse home for a time: Emerson drafted his influential essay “Nature” in an upstairs study. Meanwhile, Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, started their married life here (3 years); the recreated heirloom vegetable garden on the property was originally planted by Henry David Thoreau in honor of the Hawthornes’ wedding.
The Manse home, just like the Orchard House is in one of the most beautiful settings. The photographs don’t do it justice.
Random facts we learned there:
William Emerson was asked by George Washington to go with him to the next battle in New York after the Battle of Lexington.
The Hawthorne’s weren’t the best guests in Emerson’s home. They scratched quotes and sayings in the window panes with a diamond ring. Scratched windows can be found in multiple places in the home.
When they were restoring the home, wallpaper was found that was old enough it was stamped on the backside showing that the owners had paid the Stamp Tax when they bought the paper (one of the taxes that pushed the colonies into rebellion).
Nathaniel Hawthorne had a stuffed owl that he loved, but his wife thought was creepy. Whenever he would leave she would hide it somewhere in the house, but he would always come home and put it in a prominent place in one of the sitting rooms.
According to legend, in the American Revolution, Harvard’s faculty and students temporarily evacuated campus and held classes in Concord, and it’s thought that they brought the owl and left it behind at the Old Manse. The owl was named Longfellow because Nathaniel Hawthorne thought the old owl bore a striking resemblance to his classmate, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In Emerson’s sitting room was an Aeolian Harp. I had never seen one before. It’s a wind harp, and it plays when the windows are open and the wind blows in the home. It was beautiful. Besides being the only string instrument played solely by the wind, the Aeolian harp is also the only string instrument that plays solely harmonic frequencies. I have a new treasure I am now in search of….
Beside the harp is a poem written by Emerson about the Aeolian Harp.
Sarah Alden Bradley Ripley was a relation that lived in the Manse home. I don’t remember hearing of her before, but she sounds amazing! She was an educator and a noted scholar in a time when women were rarely admitted to universities. According to our tour guide, she taught herself 7 different languages. She was a botanist for Thoreau. She was so brilliant that Darwin sent one copy of Origin of Species to her to edit. Harvard said she was their best professor they ever had that never went to school. Harvard would send students that weren’t doing well for her to teach and catch up. While doing all of this she had 10 children!
Needless to say, the house had so many stories to tell, and we hadn’t even see the back yard yet!
The Old North Bridge
This was a painting in the gift shop at Old Manse showing the home and the Old North Bridge.
The Old Manse is set on the banks of the Concord River. There is a boat house in the backyard, and just to the right is an arched wooden bridge. As recorded in Reverend William Emerson’s diary, it was between 1-2 am on April 19, 1775 when Concord’s bells rang out to warn the townspeople that the British troops were on their way. A skirmish had just taken place on Lexington Green (which I will talk about later on), and the troops marched into Concord about 7:30 am.
British companies dispatched to secure the South and North Bridges. And here in Emerson’s backyard, Concord’s North Bridge is where the “shot heard round the world” was fired. Significance: Concord’s North Bridge is where colonial minute men and militia were first ordered to fire upon British soldiers. The first British soldiers of the American Revolution died here.
It’s crazy to think of something that significant and violent happening in the backyard of Emerson and Hawthorne’s home in such a beautiful setting. I can’t find it in my notes, but I believe it was Emerson and Thoreau years after this event, would often float down the Concord river together to enjoy the beautiful scenery, that once earlier had been the beginning stages of the creation of a new nation. It’s incredible all that has happened on this one small piece of land.
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord MA
In the cemetery is a ridge and a quiet hollow below it that looked, in Emerson’s words, like it “lies in nature’s hand.” Hawthorne described it as “a shallow space scooped out among the woods.”
It was a popular refuge and playground for locals. Emerson began spending time in the woods there in the early 1830s, when he moved into his grandfather’s nearby home, the Old Manse.
Later construction of the Cemetery began in early 1855, and Emerson was elected by the townspeople as chairman of Concord’s cemetery committee, created to oversee the project. Also on the committee was the local sheriff, who later served as a bodyguard for President Abraham Lincoln during the Gettysburg Address. Thoreau surveyed part of the property and designed a pond near the ridgetop.
Within three decades of Sleepy Hollow’s opening, this beautifully wooded cemetery would hold Thoreau, Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Hawthorne, all buried within a stone’s throw of one another among a grove of mature pines on what’s now called Author’s Ridge.
Hawthorne’s dream of settling at the top of Sleepy Hollow’s highest point eventually came true. His resting place is marked by a stone bearing simply his last name.
Louisa May Alcott’s small headstone, located within the Alcott family plot, is engraved with the humble initials L.M.A. and the dates 1832–1888. A marker with her name lies flat in the ground behind her gravestone. (Pictured is her family plot. Louisa’s stone is the farthest left, and behind it is the flat stone with her name, where people come to leave a notes and their pencils around her grave)
Thoreau, who also frequented the sleepy hollow, wrote about his two years living alone in the Concord woods beside Walden Pond (on Emerson’s property). He famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
By the time Walden was published, Concord had been stripped of 90 percent of its woodlands, and the only “tonic of wildness” accessible to the downtown was the sleepy hollow. Intentionally protecting and cultivating nature in a patch of woods in this way was unprecedented for its time. Although Walden is often credited for launching the conservation movement, the role of the Concord cemetery where its authors’ remains now reside, could be considered one of their first conservation projects.
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