Orchard House is an historic house museum in Concord, Massachusetts,
situated about a mile from the town center. Built in the early 18th
century, it is preserved as the home of Louisa May Alcott who lived there with
her natal family for about twenty years in the mid to late-19th
century. It was at Orchard House that Alcott penned her famous novel Little Women and there that she set her
story.
The house remains much the same as it was when the Alcott family lived in it.
It is a two story frame house, with an addition tacked on the back, apparently
by Alcott’s father. No structural changes have been made since and about 80% of
the furnishings belonged to the family, so visitors to the house get a strong
sense of what it was like to live there in Alcott’s time.
The house is open to
the public via guided tour only. Orchard House also offers education programs
and tours for school age children, and they promote a strong link to the Girl Scouts. Many of the
programs enable Girl Scouts of all ages to earn merit badges. School group
tours may also include “living history” with costumed actors playing the parts of members of the
Alcott family.
Other members of Alcott’s family were well-known in their own right:
Her father was an educator with radical ideas about to engage children in
learning, and a good friend and fellow Transcendentalist of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and one of Alcott’s sisters was an acclaimed artist. No formal mission statement appears on the website, however, it is
apparent that the focus of the house is to preserve it primarily as the home of
Louisa and her literary accomplishments.
http://www.louisamayalcott.org/index.html
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