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The family performed theatricals using the dining room as their stage while guests watched from the adjoining parlor.
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Conversations about abolitionism, women's suffrage, and social reform were often held around the dining room table. The Alcotts were vegetarians, and harvested fruits and vegetables from the gardens and orchard on the property. Bronson Alcott was disappointed, and recorded: "Nobody gets a chance to speak with him unless by accident." However, he added, "Still he has a tender kindly side, and a voice that a woman might own, the hesitance is so taking, and the tones so remote from what you expected." The Alcott girls befriended the Hawthorne children, who lived next door, though Nathaniel Hawthorne himself was elusive. Elizabeth, the model for Beth March, had died in March 1858, just weeks before the family moved in. During this period, the family included Bronson, his wife Abigail May, and their daughters Anna, Louisa, and May. Orchard House was the most permanent home of the Alcotts, with the family in residence from 1858 to 1877. Orchard House is adjacent to The Wayside on the historic "American Mile" roadway toward Lexington, and is less than a half-mile from Bush, the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where Henry David Thoreau and the Alcotts were frequent visitors. It seems as if the spirit of some old architect had brought it from the Middle Ages and dropped it down in Concord.The whole house leaves a general impression of harmony, of a medieval sort."
LITTLE WOMEN HOUSE FULL
Later, Lydia Maria Child visited the house and recorded her thoughts: "The result is a house full of queer nooks and corners and all manner of juttings in and out. While the home was being renovated, the family rented rooms next door at The Wayside while the Hawthornes were living in England. He also moved a smaller tenant house to adjoin the rear of the main house, making a single larger structure. He installed alcoves for busts retrieved from his failed Temple School, repaired the staircase, installed bookcases, constructed a back studio for his youngest daughter May's artwork, and installed a rustic fence around the property. "'Tis a pretty retreat," Bronson Alcott wrote soon after moving in, "and ours a family mansion to take pride in, rescued as it is from deformity and disgrace." īronson Alcott made significant changes to the building. The Alcotts' stayed in a house on Bedford Street while repairs were being made. Consequently, the Alcotts named the property "Orchard House." Initially, Orchard house was too dilapidated for them to move in immediately. At the time of purchase the site included two early eighteenth-century houses on a 12-acre (49,000m 2) apple orchard. They moved into Orchard House-which was then a two-story clapboard farmhouse-in the spring of 1858. The Alcotts returned to Concord once again in 1857. The family returned in 1845 and purchased a house named "Hillside," but left again in 1852, selling to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who renamed it The Wayside. The Alcotts had first moved to Concord in 1840, although they left in 1843 to start Fruitlands, a utopian agrarian commune in nearby Harvard. The house was first built sometime between 16.