Wayside, The

About this property

The Wayside is a historic house in Concord, Massachusetts. The earliest part of the home may date to 1717. Later it successively became the home of the young Louisa May Alcott and her family, who named it Hillside, author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family, and children's writer Margaret Sidney. It became the first site with literary associations acquired by the National Park Service and is now open to the public as part of Minute Man National Historical Park. The first record of the Wayside property occurs in 1717. Minuteman Samuel Whitney was living in this house, which still retained most of its original appearance, on April 19, 1775, when British troops passed by on their way to the Battles of Lexington and Concord at Concord's Old North Bridge. During the years 1775 and 1776 the house was occupied by scientist John Winthrop during the nine months when Harvard College was moved to Concord. Shortly after the failure of the Fruitlands experiment, educator and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott and his family moved to Concord. Beginning in October 1844, the family first lived in the home of a friend named Edmund Hosmer. Alcott's wife Abby May had recently inherited about $2,000 and they intended to use the money to buy a home. Neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson helped the family find the property to buy: a home most recently owned by a wheelwright named Horatio Cogswell. Emerson also loaned the family $500 for their purchase. Bronson took no part in the transaction being, as his wife explained, "dissatisfied with the whole property arrangement" and did not believe he could own any part of the Earth. No one seemed to know much about the history of the home, though Henry David Thoreau told the story that one of its previous owners believed he would never die and his ghost was rumored to haunt it. The Alcotts moved in on April 1, 1845; they named the home "Hillside". The Alcotts immediately began renovating what was originally a colonial saltbox home. A shed on the property was cut in half and attached to either side of the main house. Outside the house, they added terraces, arbors, and pavilions. Bronson had hoped his brother Junius and his family would move in with them and built additional rooms for that purpose. Instead, by that summer, Junius had a nervous breakdown and Bronson left to care for him. In March 1846, the family added a bedroom for their 13-year-old daughter Louisa May Alcott. It was the first room she had to herself. She wrote in her journal, "It does me very good to be alone, and Mother has made it very pretty and neat for me." In this home, Louisa and her sisters lived many of the scenes that later appeared in her book Little Women (1868–69), including the amateur plays they performed. She also began writing what would become her first book, Flower Fables (1854).

Location

Categories

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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