Orchard House: The Home of Little Women

When I came to America, I was talking to my father-in-law how much I love "Little Women".

He said, "Why don't you go visit Louisa May Alcott?"

So I told him, "She has passed away a long time ago, and, you know, 'Little Women' is a book."

And he said, "No, no, no.

There is a house -- Orchard House."

And then I got into Louisa's room, and, oh, my mind was blown.

[ Chuckles ] The tour guide said that that's where "Little Women" was written, and I was just thinking, "Oh, my favorite book was written there."

"Little Women" is a work of fiction, but the heart of the story is her story.

She and her family really lived it.

Set in Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Civil War, it's the story of the March family -- financially poor but rich in love and friends who were always welcome in their home.

The character we know as "Marmee" really was a fictionalization of her mother.

Meg is derived from Louisa's older sister, Anna; Beth is the analogue of Lizzie Alcott; Amy March, the youngest daughter, is pretty much a dead ringer for May Alcott; and Jo is Louisa herself.

Louisa admitted that she was Jo March, but said, "I didn't make her half-bad enough."

A bold nonconformist, Louisa dared to be her authentic self, full of spirit and life.

Asked to describe Louisa in two words, a cousin said, "Wit and tenderness."

Another said, "Freedom-loving and generous."

She was also prolific, writing over 200 works in all literary genres.

"Little Women" has been translated into over 50 foreign languages.

Her works made her so famous across the U.S. and around the world that she has been called "The J.K. Rowling of her day".

The Alcotts owned Orchard House from 1857 to 1884.

Now a museum, it contains so much of their lives and personal effects that one can experience the feeling of being at home with them.

What awaits you when you come to Orchard House is some of the best parts of our history.

It's an inspiring place to go.

Isn't it a great place?

Isn't it incredible?

I'm obsessed with the story.

What surprises me so much about the house is it really is a living house.

I've never seen a museum like this that has so much character and life.

Orchard House is in Concord, Massachusetts -- home to many great thinkers and writers who were close friends of Louisa's father, Bronson, and influenced Louisa's writing as well.

So much happened in Concord during that era.

At that time, writers and thinkers were starting a literary revolution and a social revolution.

Orchard House was the epicenter of a great American intellectual tradition.

We're sitting here in the study of Bronson Alcott on the ground floor of Orchard House.

It's a place that I always walk into with a tremendous amount of excitement because Thoreau was here, Emerson was here, because Hawthorne was here.

While Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing some of the great works of American history, his son, Julian, was playing with the Alcott girls.

Emerson would share books with Louisa.

You had, down the street, Thoreau spending time at Walden Pond, living deliberately in his cabin, and Bronson Alcott would come and hang out with him at night.

They were so radical.

They were abolitionists, they were environmentalists.

We don't tend to remember how much trouble the Alcotts were making and how they were rocking the boat in a society that was for the most part really very comfortable with the idea of women being subordinate in the home, with the ideas of slavery.

Bronson was the first teacher in Boston to admit a black student to his class.

The white students' parents came to Bronson Alcott en masse and said, "If the black child stays, we go."

Bronson said, "Thank you very much.

The black child stays."

Bronson Alcott was a progressive educator and transcendental philosopher.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, "Alcott is the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of the time."

Many parents of Mr. Alcott's young students, however, thought his educational ideas were shockingly radical.

He was the first to ask kids to raise their hand and participate in classes.

He was the guy who invented recess.

He really believed that children should be active in their own development.

These schools were Bronson's private enterprises.

When upset parents withdrew children and tuition, the loss of income forced his schools to close, frequent moves for the family, and financial struggle.

Even so, the progressive Alcott parents encouraged in each daughter a sense of freedom markedly different from what society dictated.

There were three daughters who were well-mannered, who were not, you know, crushed in any kind of way.

They were intellectually and artistically very active and interesting and engaging children.

But Louisa was different.

Louisa had a temper, liked to do the things that the boys were supposed to like doing -- climbing trees and falling out of them, running footraces, and would not consent to have a young male friend until she had bested him in a footrace.

Louisa was the one who sometimes took the charity a bit too far.

She went to stay with family friends in Providence, Rhode Island, and broke in to the larder and gave away all of the food to the nearby poor.

Louisa was the wild card.

She was the one whom everyone liked because she was so fascinating but whom they really couldn't understand.

One person who did understand Louisa was her mother, Abigail.

They had similar personalities and shared a strong and tender bond.

Mrs. Alcott, an excellent writer herself -- though never published -- understood the heart of a writer and encouraged her daughter.

Abigail May Alcott was one of the first social workers in Boston.

She also was incredibly active in women's rights and said, "I will go to the polls before I die if my daughters have to carry me there."

Enthusiastically led by their mother, the Alcott sisters acted out fairy tales with costumes, props, and scenery.

When older, Louisa wrote the plays full of intrigue and drama, and the girls made their own costumes and props while May painted the scenery.

And in May's bedchamber, we have the original boots that Louisa made for her role as Roderigo and for multiple roles that she wrote specifically so she could wear the boots.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's son Edward remembered weekly entertainments at Orchard House and wrote, "The evenings at the Alcott house left delightful memories.

It's hard to imagine young people having better fun than we did."

Like the March sisters in "Little Women", the Alcott sisters were exceptionally close.

They were each other's playmates, conscience, and support systems throughout their lives.

In 1857, Ralph Waldo Emerson convinced his good friend Bronson Alcott to finally put down permanent roots in Concord.

The Alcotts had moved approximately 20 times in the first 20 years of Louisa's life.

Prize-winning horticulturalist John Moore had put his extraordinary apple orchard and 12 acres of land up for sale, throwing a 200-year-old house into the bargain at no cost because of its terrible condition.

Moore assumed that the house would be torn down, but Bronson saw things differently.

He was inspired by its noble history that stretched back to the 1600s.

In 1675, a brave, compassionate lawyer named John Hoar lived in this house.

Chief Metacom, called King Philip by settlers, led a brutal war that completely destroyed 12 New England towns.

Native people who had accepted the Christian religion were refugees with no place to go.

John Hoar took them onto this property, declaring they were now under his protection.

100 years later, on April 19, 1775, the first day of the American Revolution, John Hoar's great-grandson Timothy Hoar, his wife, and 16-year-old son saw row upon row of redcoats march right by the front door of this house.

The redcoats had come to commandeer the weapons and supplies that British spies knew were hidden in Concord.

Soon, both father and son joined the Concord minutemen and the fight for American independence.

In 1857, captivated by the illustrious history of this house, Bronson knew he had found, at last, their anchoring place.

The entire family visited during the months of work, which transformed an unlivable house into a home.

Taken with the exquisite beauty of the apple orchard, Bronson named their new home Orchard House.

Family friend Lydia Maria Child writes, "The house of the Alcotts took my fancy greatly.

Mr. Alcott let every rafter and beam stay in its place.

The result is a house full of nooks and corners and all manner of juttings in and out.

The capable Alcott daughters painted and papered the interior themselves.

Artist-daughter May painted birds, flowers, and mottoes.

Owls blink at you and faces peep from the most unexpected places.

The whole leaves a general impression of harmony."

Louisa May Alcott referred to her three sisters as "The Golden Band".

The band is broken in March of 1858 with the death of the third-eldest sister, the quietest one, the one who always was a little bit shy, and that, of course, was Lizzie Alcott, who later becomes immortalized in the form of Beth March.

The four girls are now three, and they're about to become two because very shortly after the death of Lizzie, Anna, the eldest sister, announces her engagement to John Pratt.

These two occurrences are an earthquake in the life of Louisa May Alcott.

She had fondly believed that her sisters could go on as a merry quartet through life, that they could somehow, you know, hold on to a little bit of their childhood by remaining together, and now it's all coming apart.

Despite their grief, when the Alcotts moved in, Louisa declared, "The wandering family is anchored at last."

They set Lizzie's melodeon in a place of honor in the new dining room, and she was now more truly what they had always called her -- their angel in the house.

May was deeply absorbed with her art and Anna with her fianc as the family moved in to the beautiful, new Orchard House.

This left Louisa oddly adrift.

Louisa writes, "Thirty years old.

Decided to go to Washington as a nurse if I could find a place.

Help needed and I love nursing and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way.

I want new experiences, and I am sure to get them if I go."

This was a fitting choice, indeed, since Louisa had been raised by abolitionist parents who were part of the Underground Railroad.

In "Little Women", Louisa has Mr. March go off in the war, whereas, in reality, it was Louisa May Alcott herself who did that.

In the hospital, she contracted typhoid pneumonia.

They treated it with mercurous chloride.

Louisa suffered a case of acute mercury poisoning.

In January of 1863, a telegram arrives here at Orchard House with the dreaded news that Louisa May Alcott is severely ill. Bronson sets off immediately for the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown.

When he arrives, he is shocked at what he sees.

His daughter is so near death that his only hope is to bring Louisa home so that her mother and sisters can see her one last time.

They bring her into this room to recover.

May paints the owl over the fireplace because of Louisa's love of owls.

May's art further enhanced Louisa's room, where peace and her family's love helped her heal.

Louisa wrote, "The hospital experience was a costly one for me.

Never well since.

Yet it turned the tide and brought success."

That success fed her drive to help her family out of poverty and her zeal for writing.

In that era, physicians had finally "proved" that brainwork, such as writing, would ruin a woman's health, and many people thought it was simply improper.

Bronson Alcott ignored that kind of criticism, built his daughter a desk because writing was her passion.

Her mother gave her a pen with a note that said, "May this pen your muse inspire, when wrapt in pure poetic fire."

The desk that Bronson built for Louisa is an overwhelmingly pivotal act.

A father going out of his way to give his daughter agency, to give her permission to be herself and to push herself.

Prior to her time as a Union army nurse, Louisa had been publishing fairy stories and, under a pen name, "blood and thunder tales", as she called her thrillers.

In 1863, she published a fictional work based on letters she wrote during her nursing experience.

She called this fiction "reality writing" and felt that she had found her style.

She called the book "Hospital Sketches", and it was her greatest success to date.

It's the work that really changes her as a writer.

"Hospital Sketches" shows her there's better writing to be done about people who are real.

It all comes from having had this experience of observing deep, deep sadness but also the grace and dignity that can emerge from that kind of tragedy.

Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers Publishers asks her, because of "Hospital Sketches", to do the same thing, but write a girls' story.

Louisa resisted.

She didn't want to do it.

She said, "I never liked girls, I never knew that many when I was growing up except for my sisters, but okay.

I'll write some stories based on our experiences.

I don't think it's going to be worth beans."

She wrote in her journal, "Sent chapters of 'Little Women' to Mr. Niles.

He thought it dull.

So do I.

But mean to try the experiment, for lively, simple books are very much needed for girls, and perhaps I can supply the need."

Just by happenstance, he gives them to his young niece.

The niece absolutely loves them.

She's gaga about these stories about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.

Louisa is utterly astonished and overwhelmed by the response to the book.

It becomes the most popular book of its moment.

"Little Women", for Louisa, is, of course, a financial breakthrough, but it's also a coming-to-terms with the death of Lizzie.

Louisa wanted to show her readership a family can go on even when there's an absence.

The influence of that person remains.

You continue to live your life because of that person, who was so important but is no longer with you.

November 1st, 1868, Louisa writes, "Began the second part of 'Little Women'.

Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that were the only end and aim of a woman's life.

I will not marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone."

But Louisa's sister Anna had married John Pratt right in the parlor of Orchard House, so Louisa decided her sister's wedding would be the model for Meg's wedding.

Anna's wedding dress remains part of Orchard House to this day.

Part of the wonder of Orchard House is simply that it's here, that we have the original furniture, we've got the original artwork on the walls, that we've got the drawings that May Alcott herself drew on the walls of her bedroom.

Her parents allowing May to decorate her room this way nurtured a sense of artistic freedom she pursued all her life.

She dreamed of studying art in Europe.

That dream came true through Louisa's writing success and generosity, and May's talent flourished.

Her work was exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salon, and her copies of Joseph Turner's paintings were acclaimed by Britain's leading art critic, John Ruskin.

His praise of May's work was published in American newspapers to the family's delight.

Both of the parents really seemed to try to inspire their daughters to follow their passions.

It just really seemed to me to be an environment in which the individual was celebrated and in which creativity was celebrated and family was celebrated.

In 1879, here in the study of Orchard House, Bronson Alcott fulfilled a lifelong dream of establishing a school for adult education.

He called it "The Concord School of Philosophy and Literature", and the first year held the sessions in Orchard House itself.

The next year, the school had grown so much that a lecture hall was built.

The school was co-founded and run by Alcott, educator Franklin Sanborn, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a young St. Louis educator and philosopher William Torrey Harris.

They show you ways of being alive on this planet that are inspiring and exciting and hopeful, and so I kind of follow their advice.

By 1884, now in his mid-80s and having lost his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and his wife, Abigail, Bronson found purpose in the school.

And although the school continued to operate, Bronson sold the property to co-founder William Torrey Harris, who treasured Orchard House as a summer home.

In March of 1888, Louisa, now in her 50s, is in very poor health and living in the home of her physician, Dr. Rhoda Lawrence, near Boston.

Louisa goes to visit her father for what she suspects might be the last time.

She says, "Father, why are you smiling so?"

He gestures upwards, and he says, "I'm going up.

Come with me."

Three days later, Bronson Alcott passes away.

Before Louisa has heard the news, she falls into a coma, and two days later, Louisa does, in fact, "go up".

With Alcott's death, the school closed and Harris' focus changed as he was called to Washington, D.C., as Commissioner of Education under four U.S. presidents.

He no longer had time to visit or maintain Orchard House, and it fell into deep disrepair.

Eventually, the property was put up for sale, and again, the assumption was that the home would be torn down because of its poor condition.

The real-estate prospectus even said, "Perfect site for a new mansion."

Next-door-neighbor Harriet Lothrop saw people clutching copies of "Little Women" peeking in the windows and was often asked, "Is this the Alcott home?

Was 'Little Women' really written here?"

She saw how much it meant to people to find the place, so she bought Orchard House to keep it from being destroyed and went to her Concord Women's Club to present the idea of founding a house museum.

It would be one of the first in the country and one of the first dedicated to a woman.

But this was a difficult task for the women because they had to convince their husbands to be involved.

As women, they did not have the legal right to form a corporation.

The men did get involved to meet the legal requirement, and the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association was formed.

Today it is officially Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House.

The association received wonderful help from Anna's sons, Fred and John, who reminisced about their youth in Orchard House and donated back original Alcott furniture and personal items.

Today in Orchard House, you see all around you the family's possessions.

Visitors from all over the world come to see this desk.

It was my mother that introduced me to "Little Women" at the age of 8.

When my mother came to visit the United States, one of her dreams was coming to Orchard House and seeing all the things we had read about.

Louisa May Alcott really portrayed the values we believed in -- mothers care about daughters, sisters care about each other, family matters... and how important love is.

She's celebrating women for more than just, you know, being good housemakers.

She's celebrating their spirit and their independence and their intelligence.

I'm constantly surprised by how many people know about "Little Women"... know about Louisa May Alcott, and love that they're making it again.

After all these years, there's no dearth of excitement for this project because of people's love of that book.

What I think is so beautiful about the Alcotts and the March sisters is you can do anything.

You can be a housewife or you can be a teacher or you can be an adventurer, and embodied within Orchard House is all of those things.

After my mother passed away, it meant a lot to me to come back here to Orchard House and feel a little of that spirit.

When a house is built that long ago, in the 1600s, and it is built of wood, which our structural engineer reminds us is basically food for insects, it presents a challenge.

In 2000, this house was truly sinking unevenly into the ground.

The structural engineer said, "It's just a matter of time.

It may not always be repairable."

So I said, "All right, what is the solution?"

And he said, "It's putting a foundation under the entire house."

And that's a difficult thing for people to want to donate to, but that's what people did.

Fortunately, a brand-new initiative had come about -- Save America's Treasures.

We had tremendous support from many, many quarters.

They were able to lift the entire house on steel beams, build a foundation underneath it, and put it back down.

It was the third time that the house was saved.

Bronson saved it by buying it, the women saved it by creating a museum, then hundreds of people saved it again.

It's an ongoing effort.

People sometimes say, "Oh, good, you're done!"

Believe me, that's not the case.

[ Chuckles ] I started to walk through the house, and I was just drawn in.

I was just totally drawn in.

I said, "Okay.

I'm just -- I'm gonna photograph the house.

I really want to photograph the house."

From before the Alcotts lived in it into now, since it's been a museum, this was a place that was magical.

This was a place of imagination that continues with every new group that walks through this door.

It'll show you the joy in a household that's really based on love.

You spend enough time in this house and you become aware that it's really a lot more than just nails and boards and plaster and paint.

Orchard House has a soul.

Orchard House has a soul that seems to touch just about everybody who walks through the door.

When places like Orchard House are preserved with all the music and the piano and the paintings on the walls, it can seem trivial, but it's not because remembering what was possible lets us know what is possible.

I walked through and there was Beth's Chickering piano and all the paintings, and it just felt like I was walking through the book.

If you go into the rooms, not only does it feel like the March sisters were here, but it definitely does feel like the Alcotts -- like they were here and they're still here.

Orchard House endures much as Louisa's legacy does.

A friend once said of her, "She unlatches her door, and all who enter feel they are home."

For more information about Orchard House, visit LouisaMayAlcott.org.