04/04/2026
The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts around 1900, and the house in 2026. This house is best known for having been the home of three different notable authors during the 19th century: Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Lothrop. However, it is much older, having been built around 1717. It was here when the British redcoats marched past it on their way to and from Concord at the start of the American Revolution, although it has been heavily modified over the years.
The Alcott family lived here from 1845 to 1848, when Louisa was a teenager. Despite her relatively short stay here, these were formative years for Louisa, and many of her experiences here were later incorporated into her best-known work, “Little Women,” a largely autobiographical novel that was published several decades later. The Alcotts would eventually return to Concord in 1857, purchasing a neighboring house that became known as Orchard House.
Hawthorne moved into this house in 1852, along with his wife Sophia and their three children, Una, Julian, and Rose, whose ages ranged from one to eight. By this point he was a he was a well-established author, thanks to the recent publications of “The Scarlet Letter” (1850), “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), and “The Blithedale Romance” (1852). Then, in 1853 his friend, President Franklin Pierce, appointed him as the United States consul in Liverpool. As a result of this, the Hawthornes only lived here for a little over a year before moving overseas, and they would not return here until 1860, after an extended tour of Europe. Hawthorne would continue to reside here for the last four years of his life, until his death in 1864. Sophia remained here in Concord until 1868, when she and her children moved to England. She ultimately sold the house in 1870, a year before her own death.
Although Hawthorne lived in this house for a relatively short period of time, he made some substantial alterations to the house. Upon returning from Europe, he added a third-story tower to the rear of the house, which became his study. Other changes included the addition of a bedroom above the wing on the left side, and a bay window where the front door had originally been.
In 1883, the house was purchased by Daniel and Harriet Lothrop. As with so many of the previous residents of this house, Harriet was an accomplished writer. She was best known for “The Five Little Peppers,” a children’s book series that was published by her husband’s company starting in 1881, under the pen name Margaret Sidney. She eventually took over the operation of the publishing company after Daniel’s death in 1892, and she continued writing children’s books into the 1910s.
Harriet’s daughter Margaret subsequently inherited the house, and she worked to document its history with the goal of eventually selling it to a preservation organization. In 1963, she successfully lobbied for the house to be declared a National Historic Landmark, the highest level of federal recognition for a historic site. Two years later, she finally found a buyer in the National Park Service, and in 1965 the house became part of the recently-established Minute Man National Historical Park. The house has remained a part of the park ever since.
Historic image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negatives Collection.
