A few furlongs farther eastward, under the high-soaring elms of the Lexington road, we come to the "Orchard House" of Bronson Alcott, "the grandfather of the 'Little Women.'" The tasteful dwelling stands several rods back from the street, nestling cosily at the foot of a pine-crowned slope, and having a wide, sunny outlook in front. Embowered in orchards and vines, and shaded by the overreaching arms of giant elms, it seems a most delightful home for culture and contemplative study. The cottage itself is a low, wide, gabled, picturesquely irregular edifice, which our Pythagorean mystic evolved from a forlorn, box-like farm-house which he found here when he purchased the place. The rustic fence he set along the highway is replaced by an ambitious modern structure. On this hill-side Alcott, the "most transcendent of the transcendentalists," lived for nearly thirty years,--but not all of that time in this house,--coming here first after the failure of his "Fruitlands" community in 1845, and finally twelve years later. Prior to this he had been assisted by Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody in his renowned Boston Temple School, which was a failure in a financial sense only, since it furnished a theme for Miss Peabody's "Record of a School," and Louisa Alcott's girlish recollections of it provided her a model for the delightful "Plumfield" of her books.
Alcott's treatise on "Early Education," his "Gospels" and "Orphic Sayings," had been published, and his "very best contribution to literature"--his daughter Louisa--was also extant before he came to this home, but it was here that his maturer works and most of his charming essays and "Conversations" were produced.
In this house were held the early sessions of the Summer School of Philosophy, of which Alcott was the leading spirit; here his daughter, the "Beth" of "Jo's" books, died. The interior of the "Orchard House" is roomy and quaint and abounds in surprising nooks and cosy recesses. In the corner-room Louisa wrote "Little Women" and other delicious books; in the room behind it, May, "our Madonna,"--who died Madame Nieriker,--had her studio and practised the art which made her famous before her untimely end. In the great attic under the sloping roof the "Little Women" acted the "comic tragedies" written by "Jo" and "Meg" (some of them now published in a volume with a "Foreword" by "Meg") until the increasing audiences of Concord children caused the removal of the mimic stage to the big barn on the hill-side.