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By Patrick Moskow Posted on History
Pages All Book Lovers
 A woman dressed in a hoop skirt, and wearing a shawl and high-button shoes burst into the dining room at the Concord (MA) Inn while a group of us were enjoying a pleasant lunch. She seemed agitated, like a restless ghost, perhaps from the 19th century when the inn was a stagecoach stop. Embarrassed at interrupting us, she immediately apologized. To our surprise, she then introduced herself as Louisa May Alcott. She said she was looking for her father, Bronson Alcott and wanted to know whether we had seen him or any of his friends – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Of course, we hadn't. But instead of leaving to go on with her search, she lingered, telling us about the foibles of her father and his friends, their neighbors and life in the village of Concord. In this way, she entertained us all through lunch. Afterwards, we learned that she was really Jan Turnquist, a local resident who portrays Louisa May Alcott. Turnquist's performance is one of the attractions of the Literary Trail. There's also a half- day walking tour.
The tour begins at the Omni Parker House, where Charles Dickens first read The Christmas Carol before the legendary Saturday Club, whose members included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell, among others. Dickens was in the habit of practicing his presentation in front of a large gilt-framed mirror, now in the hotel’s second floor lobby, on the wall to the left of the elevators.
Just outside the hotel, at the corner of School and Washington streets, visitors can see the brick house with a steep gambrel roof built in 1712 by apothecary Thomas Cresse. His house replaced the 17th-century wood home of William and Anne Hutchinson, which had burned. Anne Hutchinson had hosted a women’s group in her home so radical that the General Court exiled her from the Puritan colony.
The building has undergone several incarnations over the centuries, but today looks much the way it did as the Old Corner Bookstore, which occupied the site beginning in the 1820s. The bookstore frequented by such prominent writers of the day as Louisa May Alcott, evolved into Ticknor and Fields, from 1833 to 1864 the country’s leading publisher.
Across the street from the bookstore is Old South Meeting House. Negro slaves, including America’s first published black poet, Phyllis Wheatley, attended services there. When the building was threatened with demolition in the 1870s, writers Julia Ward Howe, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Wendell Philips led the effort to save it.
One of the city’s leading cultural institutions, the Boston Athenaeum, founded in 1807, is located in the handsome building at No. 10-1/2 Beacon St. The independent library is the depository for important paintings and sculptures, as well as book collections, including the private library of George Washington. Visitors are welcomed into the first and second floors anytime, but reservations are necessary for Tuesday and Thursday afternoon guided tours of the elegant Edward Clarke Cabot building, constructed between 1847 and 1849. Incidentally, Louisa May Alcott lived in the building across the street when she wrote her mysteries under a pseudonym.
After a brief stop at the Boston Public Library, the bus tour continues on to Concord, passing by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Cambridge home and Mount Auburn Cemetery, the final resting place of many famous literary figures, including Julia Ward Howe and Harvard Square bookseller John Bartlett, whose book of familiar quotations is now a standard reference in every writer’s library.
Orchard House - Photo by David Wade
The Concord Museum exhibits feature the desk on which Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience and Walden. It also contains Emerson’s entire study. Next, the trolley stops at the Alcott house, across the road at Orchard House, the fictional setting for Louisa May’s novel, Little Women. But Louisa was not the only writing sister in the family. May, Amy in the novel and a painter who covered the walls of her girlhood bedroom with sketches, penned How To Be An Artist Abroad, based on her experiences living and painting in Europe.
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