"In those days the prophets were not honored in their own land, and Concord had not discovered her great men. It was a sort of refuge for reformers of all sorts whom the good natives regarded as lunatics, harmless but amusing."

"Recollections of My Childhood"
Louisa May Alcott,
May, 1888

Bronson Alcott called it "Hillside" before Hawthorne changed its name to The Wayside. Here Louisa May Alcott and her sisters lived many of the childhood adventures recalled in her 1868 classic, Little Women.
Bronson and Abby Alcott instilled ideals that Louisa would champion throughout her life, in her writings and in her actions. In 1847, with hardly enough money to feed themselves, the Alcotts sheltered a fugitive slave at Hillside. "His stay with us has given image and a name to the dire entity of slavery, and was an impressive lesson to my children," Bronson recorded.

Bronson remained the primary teacher of his children; encouraging self expression, a love of Nature, helping others, tempering independence with self control and finding one's own niche in life. Many of these ideas were put into practice at "Plumfield" in 1871 in Louisa's Little Men.

Her father's Concord friends and neighbors, fellow writers and reformers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ellery Channing also filled Louisa's childhood with rich and varied experiences and inspired many characters that appeared later in her written works.

While many of her novels and stories possess a warm, human quality that for over a century has won her millions of admirers throughout the world, her writing at Hillside was of a different sort.

Writing at The Wayside

While living at "Hillside," Louisa, thrilled at getting her own room for the first time, got down to the business of writing. Her early literary efforts were drawn from "real imagination", not real life --- fairy tales, like "The Frost King," that she told to Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter, Ellen; fanciful stories about places she had never been ("The Rival Painters - A Tale of Rome,") and chilling plays filled with loathsome villains and damsels in distress, written with her sister, Anna, and performed by the four girls.

From these youthful literary efforts came her first published book, Flower Fables (1855), dedicated to Ellen Emerson and her first published story ("The Rival Painters") in 1852.

Her best known works from the Hillside years still live on the pages of Little Women, providing some of its most endearing and entertaining scenes. While the plays, including "Norna; Or, The Witch's Curse," "Captive of Castile; Or, The Moorish Maiden's Vow," and "The Unloved Wife; Or, Woman's Faith" were products of youthful imagination, the performances of the "Little Women" in the book recaptured fond memories of plays created and staged at Hillside.