Emerson, Ralph Waldo, House

About this property

The Ralph Waldo Emerson House is a house museum located at 18 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord, Massachusetts, and a National Historic Landmark for its associations with American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. He and his family named the home Bush. The museum is open mid-April to mid-October; an admission fee is charged. The house was built in 1828 by the Coolidge family and named "Coolidge Castle". It was used as a summer house on the village outskirts, beside the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike. It is a four-square, two-story frame building in a house style common to many New England towns. While Ralph Waldo Emerson was preparing to marry Lydia Jackson (whom he called "Lidian"), he told her he could not live in her home town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. "Plymouth is streets", he wrote to her, "I live in the wide champaign." He had previously lived in Concord at The Old Manse, the Emerson family home, and hoped to return to that town. In July 1835, he wrote in his journal, "I bought my house and two acres six rods of land of John T. Coolidge for 3,500 dollars." He and Jackson married on September 14 and moved into the home the next day, along with his mother. Emerson was pleased to avoid the trouble of building. However, in a contemporary letter to his brother William, he writes: "It is in a mean place, and cannot be fine until trees and flowers give it a character of its own". To that end, he spent between $400 and $500 for enlargements and finishing. The money came from a settlement with the family of his first wife, Ellen Tucker, who had died young. He wrote that he hoped to "crowd so many books and papers, and, if possible, wise friends into it, that it shall have as much wit as it can carry." It became a central meeting place for philosophers, idealists, and poets. Emerson remained in the house for the rest of his life. In it he wrote his famous essays "The American Scholar" and "Self Reliance". He also entertained a host of notable neighbors and visitors including Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. Beginning in July 1836, the home hosted the meetings of the Transcendental Club, a group which included Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, and others. In April 1841, Thoreau accepted an invitation to move into Bush with the family. As Emerson described to his brother William: "He is to have his board, etc., for what labor he chooses to do, and he is thus far a great benefactor... for he is an indefatigable and very skillful laborer". Thoreau later built his well-known cabin on Emerson's property at Walden Pond. After his experiment in living deliberately, he returned to Bush in September 1847 and stayed there until the next July.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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