📍The Homestead, 280 Main Street, Amherst, MA 01002, USA
1855 – 1886“I was born in this brick house on Main Street in Amherst in 1830, built by my grandfather, and apart from a few childhood years in another house nearby, a year at Mount Holyoke and some short journeys, I spent my whole life here. In 1855 my father, Edward, a lawyer and congressman, bought the Homestead back, and we returned. Next door, across a meadow and a path through the garden, he built the Evergreens for my brother Austin and his wife Susan, my dearest friend, to whom I sent hundreds of letters and poems. The Homestead was my world, and I made it large. In my corner bedroom on the second floor, at a small desk by the window, I wrote almost eighteen hundred poems, often late at night, copying many into little hand-sewn booklets that no one knew of. From that window I watched the meadow, the Evergreens and the turning seasons. My father built me a small conservatory off the dining room, where I grew calla lilies, gardenias and ferns through the New England winter, and I tended the garden outside. As a girl I had pressed hundreds of plants into a herbarium, and flowers fill my poems. In later years I rarely left the house and grounds, and I came to be called the Myth of Amherst. Yet I was not lonely: I baked for my family, sent poems with flowers to friends, and lowered gingerbread in a basket from my window to the neighbourhood children. Only a handful of my poems were published in my lifetime. Today the Homestead and the Evergreens together form the Emily Dickinson Museum, where visitors stand in my bedroom and look out of the window at the world I wrote from.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today