455 Lexington Road
Concord, MA 01742
Phone: 978-318-7683
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/pwwmh/ma47.htm
“It does me very good to be alone, and Mother has made it pretty and neat for me.”
— LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
At different times in its history, this house was home to three authors. The first was Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). After a time at her father’s Utopian community at Fruitlands (see page 92), the family returned to Concord and bought this house in 1845. It dates to 1717, though the first owner’s name has been lost to history. We do know, however, that on April 19, 1775, resident and minuteman Samuel Whitely observed British troops marching by his door. Soon after, Professor John Winthop and his family lived in this house during the period when Harvard College classes were in Concord to escape the military hostilities in Cambridge.
The Alcotts named their home Hillside. It was originally a colonial saltbox house, but Amos expanded it. He cut the shed in two and attached the two halves to either side of the house, added more bedrooms including one for Louisa, and landscaped the property. Hillside, in part, became the inspiration for Louisa’s best loved book, Little Women, which she later wrote at Orchard House (see page 72). The house also became a stop on the Underground Railroad.
The family’s stay here was brief. Hillside was sold to Nathaniel Hawthorne for $1,500 in 1852. Mr. Hawthorne lived here with his wife and three children, renaming the property The Wayside. Regarding his new home, he wrote, “ Mr. Alcott . . . had wasted a good deal of money in fitting it up to suit his own taste—all of which improvements I get for little or nothing. Having been much neglected, the place is the raggedest in the world but it will make, sooner or later, a comfortable and sufficiently pleasant home.” In the 1860s he added his three-story writing tower and other rooms. But he was not entirely pleased with the end result. Wrote Hawthorne in 1864, “I have been equally unsuccessful in my architectural projects; and have transformed a simple and small farm-house into the absurdist anomaly you ever saw; but I really was not so much to blame here as the village-carpenter, who took the matter into his own hands, and produced an unimaginable sort of thing instead of what I asked for.”
Six years after Hawthorne’s death in 1864, his widow Sophia sold the house to her daughter Rose and Rose’s husband George Parsons Lathrop, who in turn sold it in 1883 to Boston publisher Daniel Lathrop (1831–1892). Daniel’s wife Harriet Lathrop (1844–1924) was a successful author. Under the pseudonym Margaret Sidney, she wrote a number of children’s books. When Sidney died in 1924, the house was inherited by her daughter. This became a museum in 1927 and a property of the National Park Service in 1965. The house recently went through a thorough restoration, reopening for tours in 2016.