Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House

Explore the home of Little Women and Louisa May Alcott

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In this bonus episode of Someone Lived Here, learn the real life story of Little Women. Kendra takes you to Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott in Concord, Massachusetts. The home is where Louisa wrote and set her book, Little Women. This home was recreated for the recent Little Women film, directed by Greta Gerwig and nominated for an Oscar.

In this episode, we unravel the real lives of Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May. By walking through the rooms and items they owned, we better understand the real people, in both their happiness and hardships.

Thank you to Jan Turnquist and the entire staff at Orchard House. The home is open to visitors almost every day. You can learn more about the home and take a virtual tour on their website.

Music for this episode was by Tim Cahill.

Below is a transcript for season 1, episode 8 of Someone Lived Here at Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. If you have any questions about the show or suggestions on how to make it more accessible please reach out at someonelivedhere@gmail.com.

Kendra:
In this bonus episode of Someone Lived Here. We’re at orchard house, the home where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. Her book has had many tellings and interpretations, including the recent Oscar-nominated film from Greta Gerwig. What we are here to explore is the real story of the four sisters who are so full and charismatic that we still want to see them brought to life 160 years later. And their real lives were much more complicated than their fictional counterparts. Welcome to Someone Lived Here, a podcast about the places cool people called home. I’m your host, Kendra Gaylord.

Kendra:
We’re outside of Brown painted colonial house on Lexington Avenue in Concord, Massachusetts. The shape is very rectangular, but has a center gabled roof on the front that makes it more recognizable. Louisa wrote and set Little Women in this home, but her own childhood wasn’t as stable. The family rarely stayed anywhere more than a year.

Jan Turnquist:
Whatever Mr Alcott’s work required was where they would live.

Kendra:
That’s Jan Turnquist. She’s the executive director of orchard house and will be helping us better understand the Alcott family. Louisa’s father Bronson Alcott was a teacher with at the time groundbreaking thoughts on teaching. He believed in equality, both of gender and of race. He didn’t believe in hitting children in the classroom and thought students should engage in conversation around topics. But there are plenty of challenges when you’re ahead of your time.

Jan Turnquist:
They had a tough time financially because Bronson Alcott’s schools were dependent upon tuition paid by parents, and if parents started to get nervous, what do you mean you’re not beating the children? Don’t you know that spoils them? Mr Alcott, what do you mean you want to admit a black child? If you do that? Our kids are coming out of the school. Pretty much nothing that Bronson all tried to do, really brought in enough income. Sometimes it did bring in some, but it wasn’t enough.

Kendra:
And this was not a small family. Bronson and Abigail married when they were both about 30 they had four daughters within 10 years. The eldest, Anna was known as the actor. Louisa as the writer, Elizabeth called Lizzie, the musician, and the youngest May, the artist.

Jan Turnquist:
Everyone in the family tried to help. Mrs Alcott took in laundry. She took in boarders. She was a paid social worker at one point.

Kendra:
And as Louisa and her sisters got older, they took on more responsibility.

Jan Turnquist:
Louisa taught one of the first kindergarten classes in Boston. Anna taught school as well. May was painting. She’d sell these paintings, you know, she’d do these little slender paintings that she called pot boilers because they could be sold so quickly. And meanwhile, Louise’s writing potboilers because she could sell those under a pseudonym.

Kendra:
And they may have been working, but they were also having fun. The plays that were depicted in little women were originally put on by Louisa and her sisters and the family had a lively social circle. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and writer, was a close friend of the family and his children were around the age of Louisa and her sisters. And they got to explore the outdoors with none other than Henry David Thoreau.

Jan Turnquist:
Thoreau was like an older brother to Louisa and her sisters. He was a lot older. He was 15 years older than Louisa, but he was trusted to take them berry picking. And he’d show them all the, the secrets of the woods, you know, here are the animal tracks. He could make bird calls perfectly. He was the one who inspired Louisa to write little fairy stories because he called her attention to this little plant with a cobweb draped over it. And he said, what do you see here? And she said, why see a cobweb? He said, no, no, no, that’s the handkerchief of a fairy. And that inspired her to start to think about the forest full of fairies and imps and human children who were influenced by the fairies. And she wrote this entire book that she dedicated to Ellen Emerson called Flower Fables.

Kendra:
And after years of moving, it was their friend who encouraged the family to settle down.

Jan Turnquist:
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who really wanted Bronson Alcott and his family to put down real roots in Concord. And ultimately that’s what they did with orchard house. This is the home where they lived the longest by far. And they worked so hard to make it a home. They were buying land because of the Apple orchard and it was a good bargain for them because all the buildings on the land were thrown in for free because they were in horrible shape and Bronson Alcott, worked hard with workman to make the whole thing livable for his family to make a habitable home for them. And Louisa and her sisters actually painted and wallpapered inside. And so it was a great family effort and I think they were all very, very proud of it.

Kendra:
Elizabeth watched as they fixed up the home and saw it come together, she wasn’t able to help because she was sick and then she got sicker. She died at the age of 22 right before the family would move into the house we’re in right now.

Jan Turnquist:
I mean, I just don’t think there are words to describe the, the grief that they felt and as people do, they just say, well, I have to keep living. I have to keep doing the things that are required of me every day. So they did, but their hearts were so heavy. It was really, really difficult for them.

Kendra:
We’re now going to walk around this home and the first thing I want you to see is something that still connects this home to Elizabeth. It’s a small room on the second floor behind Bronson and Abigail’s bedroom. It was later used as a place for the grandchildren to stay and in the corner by the window is a tiny couch.

Jan Turnquist:
A little sofa was a salesman sample. They didn’t have furniture stores. You’d just take the small pieces of furniture around on a cart and the doll in the middle was made by Beth and the face was painted by May. So she’s quite precious.

Kendra:
It’s a sewn doll wearing a long black dress with white buttons down the front and expressive eyes painted by May.

Jan Turnquist:
You can feel the difference. That part of the house was structurally from the main house and now this is the tenant house that got added on in the minute you walk in here. Feels different. This is May’s bedroom.

Kendra:
It’s smaller than most of the rooms, but feel so light and lovely. A light gray wallpaper with white flowers covers a corner. The rest is painted a light gray. And the trim of the entire room is a color you might know.

Jan Turnquist:
Well, and this unfortunately is the color of painter’s tape today, but the girls thought this Prussian blue was so striking and wonderful. It was very exciting to have that. And then of course all over the walls in this room may has decorated mostly the woodwork. So you can see around the windows under the windows over here. This is a big one that is a particular favorite of a lot of people.

Kendra:
That drawing is in pencil, but it looks like something you’d find engraved on the marble walls of a Greek temple with horses pulling a God surrounded by angels in this room. There’s also a trunk with something very special inside.

Jan Turnquist:
I mentioned when they did their plays, they could run up the backstairs and come and change costumes and these boots were made by Louisa. Now this is something we know for sure and that to me is quite thrilling that she made them, she wore them. This is a sketch that May did of Louisa playing the role of Rodrigo in the sketch.

Kendra:
Louisa is down on one knee. While her older sister Anna is in a fake tower, which was actually just a pile of dressers. The actual boots that are in front of me are brown and knee height and look worn, but not from being a century old but from being run up and down the stairs a hundred times. And that brings me to something Louisa did that very few women or people did in the 1800s.

Jan Turnquist:
Oh she loved to run. Now this is very unusual. Women were not supposed to love to run. In fact, no one was supposed to just like to run for runnings sake.

Kendra:
I kind of agree with the 1800s on this one.

Jan Turnquist:
She ran through fields. She ran in Concord. One time, she missed the train that she was going to take into Boston and she had to have somewhat run. I mean it was either very fast walking or a little jogging in there too because she made it from Concord to Boston’s approximately 20 miles. She made that in five hours.

Kendra:
That’s four miles per hour in a hoop skirt and boots. Louisa’s running also tells a lot about her mother who didn’t just allow her daughters to be independent, but encouraged it.

Jan Turnquist:
Mrs Alcott let her daughter run because she knew her daughter loved to run. Even if other people would say, that’s not proper, this is all cut. Just didn’t worry. She said, you, you do what’s right for you.

Kendra:
Louisa and her mother both could be frustrated by the restrictions of their time.

Jan Turnquist:
Louisa and her mother were very much alike in their makeup, in their temperament, and I think Mrs. Alcott was often angered by what today we would call social injustice. It made her angry to see the way women were often treated. They sometimes sheltered women who were being put today, we would say abused by their husbands. Back then it was legal and Louisa was the same way. Louisa had a temper and Louisa found it very hard sometimes to put up with what society thought she should be doing. I think that both of them realize that about each other. They felt very connected.

Kendra:
We’re now going to continue to the next room.

Jan Turnquist:
This is Louisa’s bed chamber. Although she and Anna shared it at first when they first moved into the house and this little shelf desk is what Bronson built for her. And it was such an exciting thing because it wasn’t just that she had this lovely desk to write on, but it was that it gave her a sense of agency. Her mother gave her this little pen with the note, “May this pen, your muse inspire.” And I just think that that is a very symbolic gesture.

Kendra:
When Anna was 29, she moved out of the family home to marry John Pratt. They had met while acting opposite each other in a play in Concord. They were married downstairs in the parlor. This left Louisa and May in the Alcott home. A couple of years later in 1862, Louisa would decide to serve as a nurse in a union hospital in Washington DC. She was 30 years old. The matron of the hospital was Hannah Ropes. She was also a published writer. The two women work together in the morning shifts. Louisa would write letters home with stories from her experience. One of these stories became Death of a Soldier which gives a nod to the sister she was still mourning. “I had been summoned to many deathbeds in my life, but to none that made my heart ache as it did then since my mother called me to watch the departure of a spirit akin to this in its gentleness and patient strength. As I went in, John stretched out both hands. I knew you’d come, I guess I’m moving on, ma’am.”

Kendra:
In the beginning of January, both Hannah Ropes and Louisa May Alcott got pneumonia, which would become typhoid fever. Calomel was a common medicine thought to cure illness. It also contained mercury. After a week, the superintendent of all union nurses sent word to Bronson Alcott of Louisa’s worsening condition. When he arrived two days later, he found her semi-conscious and extremely thin in a room with broken windows. She was able to travel home five days later. The day before they left, Hannah Ropes would die in that hospital and Louisa was far from better. It was in this bedroom where she slowly recovered.

Jan Turnquist:
When she’s in this room and they’re there watching over her, they think she probably won’t even make it, but they all take turns sitting with her and while sitting with her May paints the flower panel. May said she wished that she could bring her fresh flowers every day, but these would last longer.

Kendra:
and she was right. They definitely lasted longer. The panel goes from the desk up to the ceiling. There’s a black background with white Calla lilies and orange nasturtiums. They’re green leaves intertwined. Calla lilies were thought to represent beauty and nasturtiums to represent a victory in battle and Louisa May Alcott was victorious in her battle although her health would never fully recover. She survived and would go on to immortalize herself and her family.

Kendra:
Her stories of the civil war were published in a Boston newspaper and then republished in a book titled Hospital Sketches. She wrote them under her own name but continued to write what she called her Blood and Thunder Tales under the pseudonym a A.M Barnard. Her publisher Thomas Niles urged her to write a novel for girls. She started it and then stopped based off her past experience. She didn’t believe that a book for young women would be that profitable. That’s when her publisher suggested a trade. He would publish her father’s book on philosophy if she wrote the book, that would become Little Women partially based off her own life, but with changes that made it more widely understood.

Speaker 2:
When Louisa wrote Little Women, she changes time. She takes their young years that were live before the Civil War and moves that youth into wartime. That way her father, who in real life was too old to go. Now he’s the right age. He can go off and serve in the civil war. That would mean that the whole family is struggling because that was often the case. If fathers away at war, then the women are left at home, not very financially well off, but everybody understands that sacrifice. So Louisa wanted to have that kind of simple background. She didn’t want to try to write a book and explain all their moves and all of her father’s teaching ideas and what they were all thinking and struggling with. It made it a much cleaner tale. Her father was a very philosophical and that sort of fits with the idea of a minister and then she really gives her father her war experience. She took care of the ill. now the Reverend Mr March in the war, he’s not fighting, but he’s taking care of them in spiritually. So she just gives him her war experience. Then the telegram comes, he’s very ill. that’s exactly what had happened. The telegram had gone, she was the one who was ill and he, everybody worries that he’s not going to make it and then he does make it. So I think it just makes it much more socially acceptable. It just flows better and it fits with the time because everyone had just been through this terrible war experience and many people had lost loved ones and it’s, it’s sort of a brave story. We can keep going where we’re not giving up. We’re going to keep our family together as best we can and keep moving forward.

Kendra:
And unlike the book, a rich aunt wouldn’t bring May to Europe, but instead Louisa and May would travel there together. Off of Little Women’s success while in Rome, Louisa and May got word that Anna’s husband had died 10 years after their wedding in that front room of Orchard House, Louisa wrote them a book called Little Men dedicated to John and Anna’s two boys and leaving them the profits. May would stay on studying art in Europe. But Louisa returned to Concord at 38 where both responsibilities and fame were awaiting her.

Jan Turnquist:
Louisa did not enjoy being famous. She enjoyed the financial security for sure. She, she wanted that. She wanted the success that comes with selling your books, but she did not want people knocking on her door asking for autographs. She would talk about how reporters would sometimes sit on the fence out here in front of orchard house sketching her when she was going out into the garden with one of her nephews. I mean, this was not a pleasant experience and she said fame was her worst scrape.

Kendra:
And although Louisa love being with her family, Concord, felt slow compared to Europe. So she spent much of her time living in Boston.

Jan Turnquist:
There was so much more excitement, much more to do in Boston. She could go to the theater, she could listen to Theodore Parker’s sermons. He was her favorite minister to listen to. He had Salons in his home on Sunday afternoons and she was invited and she’d meet all kinds of people there, and so it was just a more stimulating environment. Plus her publisher was there so she could stay in the Bellevue Hotel up on Beacon Hill, really near the Athenaeum and she could be near her publisher and then go out with friends to the theater or to a concert.

Kendra:
Louisa also enjoyed the city since it gave her more privacy. It was here. She wrote Work. It follows Christie who works many different jobs. Louisa said to a friend of the book, “Christie’s adventures are many of them my own. This was begun at 18 and never finished until H W Beecher wrote to me for a serial and paid $3000 for it.” Work was an apt title for a book written by Louisa because she truly never stopped working. During one book’s publication another two would be written in a journal.

Kendra:
She wrote, “When I had the youth, I had no money. Now I have the money. I have no time and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life. I suppose it’s the discipline I need, but it’s rather hard to love the things I do and see them go by because duty chains me to my galley” but Louisa’s constant work made so much possible for her family and her sisters. May, would travel back and forth from Europe, often spending years at a time. They’re painting professionally in London and Paris. It was in Europe where she got the word that their mother had died.

Kendra:
Abigail Alcott also known as Marmee, both in Little Women and in real life had been declining over the years. Louisa wrote in her journal of her final day. “She was very happy all day thinking herself, a girl again with parents and sisters around her, looked often at the little picture of May and waved her hand to it. Goodbye little May. Goodbye.”

Kendra:
While Louisa, Anna, and Bronson Alcott grieved together, May was alone in London. She had befriended a Swedish man who was kind and sympathetic in her grief. Their friendship turned into love and at age 37 May Alcott married, Ernest Neireker in London. A year and a half later, the couple were expecting a child May wrote to Louisa saying, “If I die when baby is born, don’t mourn for I have had in these two years more happiness than comes to many in a lifetime.”

Kendra:
May did not die in childbirth. They named their baby. Louisa May Neireker, but a month after May took a turn for the worse and she began making plans for what might happen. May’s husband, Ernest sent a telegram to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Louisa found Emerson looking at May’s portrait. He said, “my child, I wish I could prepare you, but alas, alas.” The telegram read “May is dead.”

Kendra:
May requested that Louisa raise her daughter and in Louise’s journal she wrote, “I see now why I lived, to care for May’s child and not leave Anna all alone.” Lulu came to the United States after a few months and they celebrated her first birthday. Louisa adored her niece. She and Anna worked as a team to raise their sister’s child.

Kendra:
In June, 1884 Louisa sold Orchard House. She wrote in her journal “Glad to be done with it, though after living in it 25 years, it is full of memories; but places have not much hold on me when the dear persons who made them dear are dead.” She sold the place to William Torrey Harris, a friend who was involved in Bronson school of philosophy. He was often in Washington DC and use the home as a summer home. He did very little to change the house and never painted over the sketches by may that adorn the walls.

Kendra:
Despite Louisa’s consistently poor health, she continued to write and publish books with one to two books coming out every year and in her preface to Jo’s boys, she shared a bit of her sadness with her audience, “To account for the seeming neglect of Amy, let me add that since the original of that character died, it has been impossible for me to write of her as when she was here to suggest, criticized and laugh over the namesake. The same excuse applies to Marmee. But the folded leaves are not blank to those who knew and loved him.”

Kendra:
Bronson Alcott had been getting sicker. He was 88 years old when she visited him. She knew it was most likely their final meeting.

Jan Turnquist:
She went to visit him and he said, “I am going up. Come with me.”

Kendra:
She returned to the physician’s home where she was staying and went to bed. When she woke up the next morning, she had horrible head pain. She recognized her nephew and then was unconscious. Her and her father had shared a birthday and when she died on March 6th, 1888. She did not know that her father had died two days earlier. Bronson Alcott was 88. Louisa May Alcott was 55.

Kendra:
And that made Anna the first born of the Little Women to also be the last living. Lulu went back to Europe to live with her father at the age of nine and as had become tradition, Louisa had given her a parting gift, Lulus Library, a published collection of 32 short stories in three volumes. They were stories that she told to May as a child and retold to her favorite niece.

Kendra:
Before I left Concord, I wanted to see the place where Louisa and her family were buried on a Hill in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a path called Author’s Ridge. There is a large stone for the Alcott’s with small headstones in front. They’re all equal in size with their initials. Elizabeth, the daughter, who never made it past 22 now sits in the center surrounded by her family. Louisa’s is easy to spot as visitors have left notebooks and pencils. Even though I think Louisa deserves a break from writing. Like most graveyards, the Alcott’s are not alone. The path is called authors ridge because they’re surrounded by their community of friends and neighbors who also just happened to be famous authors. Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne are all a few steps away from the Alcotts. There’s also the grave of a neighbor who made it possible for us to walk through Orchard House today. Around 1910, 12 years after Louisa’s death, the home was up for sale.

Jan Turnquist:
But it was in really bad condition. The real estate prospectus is what they used to call it said, perfect site for new mansion. There were no trespassing signs in the yard. Um, it really looked like it was just about ready to be torn down. Living next door was a woman named Harriet Lothrop, wife of publisher Daniel Lothrop. So they were a wealthy family. She saw girls with copies of little women clutched in their arms, peaking in all the windows and braving right through the no trespassing sign and the tall, tall grass, and she thought that house should be saved. It’s really a shame to think that nobody will be able to see it anymore. It’s right there where Louisa wrote Little Women. She set the book there as well. So she bought the house so that it wouldn’t be torn down.

Jan Turnquist:
Then she went to the women of Concord. Many of them belong to something called the Concordian Women’s Club. Many women from the club discussed it and decided to form their own corporation, but they had to have their husbands do it for them because legally they had no standing. This was still before women had the vote. Women didn’t have the right to form a corporation, a nonprofit corporation, anything. And they formed the, Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association. Husbands helped to legally form the corporation, but it was still the women doing the work. They had Freddie and Johnny, Anna’s two sons come in and help them with paint color. What color was this supposed to be? You know, and they really helped. And then they brought back Freddy and Johnny brought back furniture, personal belongings. I mean, it really was amazing how the whole thing came together.

Kendra:
Orchard House is still run under that nonprofit that Harriet Lothrop and the other Concord women created over a hundred years ago. The life of Louisa and her sisters wasn’t as simple as what she wrote in Little Women, but the love between them was as real and fiction as it was in life.

Kendra:
Thank you so much for listening to this bonus episode. Leave a review so I can smile after crying my eyes out recording this whole episode. We’ll be back this spring with new episodes and you can follow on Instagram so you don’t miss any updates. Thank you to Jan Turnquist and Orchard House and Tim Cahill for our music. If you have any questions about the show and want to read more on Louisa, go to our website.