📍Orchard House, 399 Lexington Road, Concord, MA 01742, USA
1858 – 1877“My father, Bronson, was a philosopher and teacher with grand ideals and no head for money, and by the time I was a young woman we had moved more than twenty times, once to a failed utopian farm. In 1858 we finally settled in Orchard House on the Lexington Road in Concord, named for its apple trees, with Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne as neighbours. Father knew how much I needed a place to write, so he built me a little half-moon shelf desk between the two front windows of my bedroom. My sister May, the artist, drew and painted on the walls and woodwork, and her pictures are still there. We acted plays in the parlour, argued, sewed and dreamed, and I wrote stories to help keep the family afloat. In 1868, at that half-moon desk, I wrote Little Women, setting it in this house and putting my sisters and myself into Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Orchard House was home for twenty years, and much of what is inside it today is just as we left it.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google