Wayside

The Wayside is the only house in America that sheltered the Revolution, Little Women, and The Scarlet Letter. On April 19, 1775 it was Samuel Whitney's house — muster master of Concord's minute men, named in General Gage's orders as a place to search for arms — and the British column marched right past it on the Battle Road to the North Bridge. Seventy years later it was the Alcotts' 'Hillside,' where Louisa May lived the childhood she would turn into Little Women — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy playing out in these rooms the scenes the book made immortal.

Hawthorne bought it from the Alcotts in 1852 and gave it the name it keeps — the only home he ever owned, where the author of The Scarlet Letter raised Una, Julian, and Rose and added the tower study at the rear where he wrote. The Lothrops came in 1883 — Harriett, who wrote the Five Little Peppers as 'Margaret Sidney,' and publisher Daniel — and preserved it deliberately as Hawthorne's house; their daughter Margaret, born at the Wayside in 1884, sold it to the Park Service eighty years later.

And between the literary layers the house kept its other register — in the 1840s the Alcotts aided at least one fugitive slave on the flight to freedom, in the same rooms where the girls staged their plays. It is now a Network to Freedom site among the park's April 19th witness houses: the building that watched the first day of the Revolution and housed three of the families who wrote America's literature.

The Wayside is the archive's authors file — the Concord house that Gage ordered searched in 1775, where the Alcotts hid a fugitive and lived Little Women, Hawthorne wrote in the tower, and Margaret Sidney was born into the house she preserved for the nation.