Marmee & Louisa (50 page)

O
rchard House, a museum and educational center in Concord, Massachusetts, that receives tens of thousands of visitors each year, is a fine start to a tour of the landscapes of Abigail and Louisa May Alcott. My first visit to Orchard House was in the summer of 1968, exactly a hundred years after Louisa wrote
Little Women
there in her bedroom overlooking the front yard and the road. Nine years old, I arrived with my mother and our elderly aunt, Charlotte May Wilson, who announced on crossing the threshold, “Cousin Louisa’s house!” Aunt Charlotte, a feisty Victorian spinster who ran an inn at the tip of Cape Cod, was a woman who wore a dress, nylon stockings, and leather shoes even to the beach. Proud keeper of the family tree, she was devoted to our ancestors but rarely amused by children.

“Well, well, here we are at Cousin Louisa’s,” Aunt Charlotte repeated. I wanted to hide, but the Orchard House guides rose to the bait and clamored for more. My aunt was the author’s first cousin, two generations removed, she explained. Her grandmother and namesake, Charlotte May Wilkinson, was Louisa’s first cousin and childhood playmate.

During our tour of the Orchard House parlor, where Anna Alcott had married John Pratt in 1860, Aunt Charlotte mentioned that her great-grandfather the Reverend Samuel Joseph May had performed the ceremony and signed the marriage license, which still hangs on the wall. Nearby, in the dining room, Aunt Charlotte quietly pointed out to my mother, “There’s the sixth of your sister’s dining-room chairs,” which was somehow separated from its mates in the family shuffle.

It was clear even to a nine-year-old that Aunt Charlotte felt strongly about Cousin Louisa. Born in Syracuse, New York, and raised in 1890s Detroit, my aunt had listened rapt to her grandmother Charlotte’s stories of growing up with her cousin Louisa, whom she outlived by more than three decades. Like Louisa, Aunt Charlotte was devoted to literature, to women’s education, and to equal rights. After graduating from Smith College, in 1917, Aunt Charlotte made her own way in the world, as her cousin had. She emulated Louisa by serving as a Red Cross nurse in Europe during the First World War, and then followed her Aunt Abigail in becoming a city social worker. At least two other women in the family remained single and always worked: Katherine May Wilkinson, a history teacher at the Chapin School who was educated at Smith College (class of 1897) courtesy of the Alcotts (“in return,” according to a family memoir, “for Grandpa [Samuel Joseph May]’s kindnesses” to Abigail), and Katherine’s sister Marion, who ran an inn overlooking Province-town Harbor. In the early 1930s Aunt Marion passed the inn to her niece Charlotte, my aunt, who hosted Mary Pickford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many other guests at the Red Inn.

As a girl I often played on the parlor floor in Aunt Charlotte’s little red house across the road from the inn. Occupied by the tiny windup toys adorning her window sills, I listened to my elderly, childless aunt cluck over our forebears like a hen over her brood. One memorable ancestor was scalped by Indians in seventeenth-century New York, along with all her little children, Aunt Charlotte added, ominously. Another ancestor was a Salem witch judge who realized his mistake and repented for hanging innocent people as witches. He wore penitential sackcloth for the rest of his life and became something of a feminist, according to Aunt Charlotte, who clearly loved the witch judge best. These ancestors seemed to be present and familiar to her, as if they were her friends, which in a way, I suppose, they were. While her fascination with dead people seemed ghoulish to a child, I see now that most families have an Aunt Charlotte, the relative who takes the time to learn and share stories about the family’s past.

A few years ago, I found high on a bookshelf the family tree that Aunt Charlotte had handwritten and presented to me on my thirteenth birthday. This volume of names and dates as long ago as the sixteenth century arose from decades of genealogical research by my aunt in North America
and even Europe, where she explored the Mays’ Spanish-Jewish and Portuguese antecedents. It was only in recent years, as an adult beginning to research the lives of the ancestors she had first described, that I could appreciate Aunt Charlotte’s gift.

Of late I have returned often to Orchard House to read documents, interview experts, and study its collections. The house, which the Alcotts occupied from 1858 until the late 1870s, is only one of many Alcott sites in Concord. Just up the road to the right of Orchard House is Hillside, the house Louisa lived in for three years as a teenager. Nathaniel Hawthorne later renamed it Wayside, the name it bears today. Open to the public and run by the National Park Service, Wayside is well worth a tour. Louisa’s little room was in the left rear of the house, facing back toward the steep hill where Bronson built a rock garden. If you return from here to Orchard House and continue on for half a mile, just as Abigail and Louisa often did, you arrive at the Emerson house, which is now also a museum.

The house in which Abigail died is 255 Main Street, two and a half blocks west of Concord center on the left. Privately owned, it bears a historic marker indicating it was the Thoreau house; Henry David Thoreau and his siblings grew up and lived there. Louisa and Anna bought the house in the spring of 1877 for Anna and her boys. Abigail moved there that fall, a few weeks before her death, and Louisa and Bronson remained there with Anna’s family that winter.

To see the Dove Cottage that the Alcotts occupied in the early 1840s, continue past the Thoreau house on Main Street, turn left at Route 62, and pass the Concord boatyard. Immediately after a railroad bridge you will see on your right the house that belonged to the Alcotts’ landlords, the Hosmers, and beyond that the rental cottage. Their rear yards descend to the Concord River, where one can still row to view the cliffs the Alcott girls saw with their uncle Junius in the summer of 1842.

Louisa and Abigail are buried at Sleepy Hollow cemetery, on Poet’s Hill, along with Elizabeth, Anna, Bronson, Emerson, and Thoreau. An American flag at Louisa’s gravestone denotes her status as a veteran. There is a memorial stone for her sister May, who was buried in Paris, where she died.

Five miles east of Concord, just before Lexington’s Town Green, is the pumpkin-colored eighteenth-century house in which Abigail’s
Aunt Q experienced the first shots of the American Revolution, a house that Abigail may have visited later with her aunt. The Hancock-Clarke House, as it is known, is now a museum. It was built by John Hancock’s grandfather the Reverend Thomas Hancock in 1737. John Hancock moved here as a boy in 1744, on the death of his father, and after 1750 he lived on Beacon Hill with his childless uncle and aunt, Thomas and Lydia Hancock. The house contains Hancock portraits and furnishings and relics of April 19, 1775: the first-floor bedroom where Dolly (later Aunt Q) slept that night alongside her fiancé’s Aunt Lydia; the four-poster bed upstairs that John Hancock and Sam Adams shared; and the table at which the two men took tea.

The city of Boston contains many locations of Louisa and Abigail’s lives. Indeed, their residences in the city seem too numerous to count. Their Beach Street boardinghouse was a stone’s throw from the Chinese gate marking the entrance to Chinatown; their uncle Samuel May’s “commodious” house at 88 Atkinson Street was a short block from the Rose Kennedy Greenway, above Rowes and India Wharves; and several of their boardinghouses were in the bustling commercial district along Washington Street. Abigail’s birthplace is in modern-day Post Office Square, at the intersection of Congress and Milk streets in the city’s financial district, where skyscrapers have replaced all the wooden houses and gardens of her day. A pillar topped with a golden eagle “in memory of George Thorndike Angell, 1823–1909,” who founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, adorns the square. The site of the house on Federal Court in which Abigail grew up, one inspiration for the setting of
Little Women
, is a few blocks away, near South Station. Federal Court, the cul de sac on which the May house stood, is now an alley in the shadow of the high-rise Winthrop Square parking garage, but Federal Street remains. Abigail’s Aunt Q spent her final decade at 4 Federal Street, in the thick of the city’s modern downtown.

King’s Chapel, the eighteenth-century Georgian-style “Stone Church” in which Abigail and Bronson were married in 1830, is on Tremont Street a block west of Government Center. King’s Chapel—which was both America’s first Anglican church, in 1686, and also its first Unitarian church, in 1785—still offers Sunday services. Inside, past the double Corinthian columns and near the center of the main gallery,
is the erstwhile May family pew, no. 20, with its mahogany rails and pink upholstery. There is a memorial plaque in the church to Colonel May, which Abigail and Louisa viewed at its installation in 1874. The pulpit of King’s Chapel dates to 1717, the communion table to 1696. The busts in the chancel are of James Freeman, the friend of Colonel May who presided at the burial of six-year-old Edward May in 1802, and of the Reverend Francis Greenwood, who officiated at the Alcotts’ wedding and whose daughter Colonel May adopted. The huge bell in the church tower is the last one made by Paul Revere. The church’s burying ground, Boston’s oldest cemetery, contains all that remains of John Winthrop, William Dawes, and Abigail’s parents and most of her siblings. Just below the church at the other end of School Street is the Corner Bookstore building, 271 Washington Street, an early eighteenth-century structure where Louisa and her literary contemporaries visited the publishing house Ticknor & Fields.

The entrance to the Granary Burying Ground, where Abigail’s mother pointed out to her children their ancestor Judge Samuel Sewall’s grave, is across Tremont Street from King’s Chapel. Toward the back of the cemetery, between the tomb of Paul Revere and that of Benjamin Franklin’s parents and siblings, a large, rectangular nineteenth-century monument is marked “SEWALL . . . Judge Sewell [
sic
] tomb / Now the property of his heirs.”

Returning to King’s Chapel and turning left on Beacon Street, you approach the Massachusetts State House, built two years before Abigail was born. A large twentieth-century mural of Judge Sewall making his 1697 public repentance for hanging innocent people as witches adorns the Chamber of the House of Representatives. Beyond the State House on the same side is the site of the grand home of Abigail’s Aunt Q and John Hancock, at what was then No. 30 Beacon Street. The house, built in 1739 on a two-acre plot owned by John Hancock’s uncle Thomas, had magnificent gardens and views of Boston Common, which John Hancock was instrumental in improving. During Abigail’s childhood cows still grazed on the Common, but they were banned in 1830, two years before Louisa’s birth. As a small child Louisa played in the Common and fell into the Frog Pond. A few blocks away, on the north side of Beacon Hill, is the 1806 African Meeting House, at 46 Joy Street. The “oldest black church edifice still standing in the United States,” this building
was renovated to its former glory in the early twenty-first century. It was one of the 1832 meeting places of William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel Joseph May, Samuel E. Sewall, and other founders of America’s first antislavery society. The meeting house is operated by the National Park Service and open to the public as part of the city’s Museum of African-American History (
www.maah.org
). Boston’s former Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail are now Boston’s conjoined Trails to Freedom, with an office in Faneuil Hall. Just north of Beacon Hill, on Bunker Hill in Charlestown, you can climb to the top of the Monument to the Revolutionary dead whose first stone was laid by Aunt Q’s old friend General Lafayette in 1825.

Beacon Hill boasts many addresses associated with Louisa and Abigail. Louisa purchased and lived during the last few years of her life at 10 Louisburg Square. Her first cousin Elizabeth Willis Wells, whom Abigail had cared for in the 1820s, also lived as an adult on Louisburg Square. Louisa’s cousins Thomas and Mary Sewall lived for many years at 98 Chestnut Street. In the early 1850s Abigail rented 20 Pinckney Street, and nearly twenty years later Louisa and her sister May took rooms at 69 Pinckney.

The Mill Dam site where twenty-five-year-old Louisa considered suicide in 1858 is at the base of Beacon Hill at the intersection of Arlington and Beacon streets. This is now a corner of the city’s Public Garden, which did not exist until 1860. The dam’s path across the tidal waters of the original Back Bay was roughly that of Beacon Street heading west toward Kenmore Square.

On the eastern side of Boston Common, Bronson’s Temple School was in a building at the corner of Tremont Street and Temple Place. The Alcotts lived on Temple Place in the summer of 1850. A block down Tremont Street is West Street, where Bronson took rooms in the 1830s. Elizabeth Peabody ran her bookstore and library and hosted Margaret Fuller’s conversations to women at 13 West Street. The nearest extant structure open to the public is Max & Dylans Kitchen Bar at 15 West Street.

In Roxbury, where émigré Mays settled in the seventeenth century, no marker indicates the location of Louisa May Alcott’s death, in March 1888. The house on Dunreath Street in which Dr. Rhoda Lawrence ran her rest home was torn down in the first half of the twentieth century.
A Baptist Church and its parking lot now occupy the site, at the corner of Dunreath and Warren streets, high on a hill overlooking the hills of Brookline to the west and the expanse of the Back Bay to the east. In the nearby South End neighborhood, the Alcotts’ addresses include 81 West Cedar Street, 29 Dedham Street, and Franklin Square, at 26 East Brookline Street.

In Quincy, a city just south of Boston, the canary yellow house in which Aunt Q grew up is open to the public one Saturday afternoon a month each summer. The Dorothy Quincy House, also known as the Quincy Homestead, is “one of the few houses in Massachusetts in which the elements of a seventeenth-century building are still clearly visible,” according to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. This National Historic Landmark is at the corner of Hancock Street and Butler Road about a quarter-mile north of the Quincy National Historic Site. It was built in 1685 by Edmund Quincy Jr. and occupied by five generations of Quincys. In the early twenty-first century one of John Hancock’s decrepit chariots was still in its garage.