Orchard House, named after the apple orchard that once existed behind it, was the home of Louisa May Alcott and her family for many years. It was that she wrote Little Women. This is the front view of the house from the street. On the first, floor, Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott, study is on the left in this picture, and the parlor (a formal gathering room) is on the right. The Alcott girls often turned that room into the audience’s sitting space for their theatrical productions, which Louisa memorialized in her novel, utilizing the large open doorway between the parlor and dining room as a proscenium arch for their stage.

The side view shows the varied construction of the house. The house is built in three segments that predate the American Revolution. The front section of the house (right) was built in the 18th century. The rear section, a 17th century structure, was originally located further back from the road. It was moved to its current location and turned around to form the new building’s rear section, which includes the kitchen and the site’s gift shop. The central section was constructed to join together the two existing buildings.

The kitchen features many of Bronson Alcott’s innovations. The entrance door to the kitchen is angled so that it closed automatically behind someone entering. This is a time saver, and a heat saver in the winter, when someone in the family would come into the room arms laden with firewood for the wood stove. Near the cast iron stove, Bronson built a ladder-style clothes-drying rack that takes advantage of the stove’s heat to dry laundry. Also in the same corner is a built-in kettle type of apparatus to heat water. However, the room’s one luxury is the large, rectangular soapstone sink Louisa bought with earnings from her writing for her mother.

Louisa’s room is a large, spacious room on the second floor overlooking the front yard. This room, like all the rooms in the house, hold furniture and appointments that belonged to Louisa and her family. Throughout the house, Louisa’s sister May added artwork to the interior walls that is preserved today under sheets of glass affixed to the walls. May’s own room is covered in artwork, as is the room she used as her studio.

Bronson Alcott was an innovative educator whose life, and that of his family, was problematic partly because of his ideas about education. His school, The Concord School of Philosophy, is at the rear of the side yard. This school was established in 1880. The building is now an open forum summer school for adults. Bronson was also strongly transcendentalist, including Ralph Waldo Emerson in his circle of friends.

Growing up in this house had to be an adventure of sorts for Louisa and her sister. With major transcendentalists like Emerson, and later the new generation exemplified by Henry David Thoreau, provided a stimulating intellectual atmosphere. On the down side, was Bronson's inability to adequately support his family financially. Many of the schools he established failed, in part because of his radical educational theories ~ theories that do not seem so radical today. At one point, Mrs. Alcott earned a living as the country's first social worker when the family resided in Boston. Of course, in later years, Louisa's literary success was the family's financial savior.