Sleepy Hollow: Louisa May Alcott's Legacy

The following is part eight of the Sleepy Hollow series.

Still up here on Authors Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, let's leave the Hawthorne gravesite and walk a few steps to the Alcott family plot on the other side of the path. [Photo 1]  The tall center stone tells us that this is the Alcott plot, but notice that the five small upright stones across the front are inscribed with only initials.

The leftmost front stone, marked "LMA," marks Louisa May's grave, as the flat stone behind it with her full name confirms. [Photo 2] The full names of all family members, along with their birth and death dates, are listed on the rear of the large Alcott center stone. [Photo 3]

Louisa May is undoubtedly the most famous member of the family, due to her semi-autobiographical novel Little Women (in which the narrator Jo is based on Louisa May) and its popularization in several motion pictures and an excellent PBS "American Masters" documentary, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind the Woman (available on DVD). Flowers and notes of love and appreciation are regularly left on her grave by her world-wide legion of fans.

A brief discursion: The gravesite mementos remind me of what I noticed on the abutting cemetery plot today. [See photo 4] Someone remembers Thoreau's pencil-making days.

Note Louisa May's U.S.Veteran medallion and American flag. [Photo 5] Flags were placed on all veterans' graves in Sleepy Hollow in preparation for Memorial Day.  Louisa May qualifies because of her service as a nurse during the Civil War, treating wounded and dying troops at Union Hotel Hospital near Washington DC. (See her Hospital Sketches) For the typhoid fever and pneumonia she contracted during that experience, she was treated with a mercury derivative that damaged her nervous system and from which she never fully recovered.

Growing up in Concord, Louisa May, was a great admirer of her father's friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And she loved the spiritual uplift she got from the Concord woods and meadows. "A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there," she wrote in her journal, "with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life."

LMA was, first and foremost, a writer. Her best known works, Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys, told semi-biographical stories based on the lives of the four Alcott sisters. Those novels she once referred to as "moral pap for the young." Using pen names, she also wrote books of quite another kind, pulp fiction thrillers. The income from her writing eventually gave the Alcott family some much needed financial stability. 

Louisa May was an active abolitionist, helping to shelter runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. She was also an early feminist. Protesting the exclusion of women from Concord's 1875 Centennial parade and ceremony at (the celebration at which Daniel Chester French's Minute Man statue was unveiled), she wrote "It was impossible to help thinking, that there should have been a place for the great granddaughters of Prescott, William Emerson, John Hancock, and Dr. Ripley, as well as for ... the scissors that cut the immortal cartridges" for the shot heard round the world. "It seemed to me that ... the men of Concord had missed a grand opportunity of imitating those whose memory they had met to honor."

With her mother, Abby, she worked for women suffrage. In the 1880 Town Meeting, Louisa May was one of the 20 women who cast ballots for the town School Committee -- the very first votes cast by women in any Concord election. Sadly, Abby had died before the state legislature gave women even that limited right to vote. 

The next stone (second from left), reads "MAN" for May Alcott Niereker, the youngest of the four sisters and the artist who gave Daniel Chester French his first sculpting tools. (At birth, May was named "Abigail May" after her mother, but in her twenties, chose to be called "May.") 

May (the model for Amy in Little Women) studied art and painted in Concord, Boston, and, after Louisa May's financial success made it possible, in Europe. She and her husband, Ernst Niereker, a young violinist from Switzerland, lived in a Paris suburb. She died there in 1879, a few weeks after giving birth to her daughter, Louisa May, called "Lulu." At May's wish, Lulu was raised by her sister Louisa May until Louisa May's death in 1888. The "MAN" stone is just a remembrance; May is buried in Paris.

The third stone, "ESA," marks the grave of Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, the third of the four sisters, on whom the Little Women character Beth is based. Elizabeth was a shy girl with "a peaceful manner." Like the fictional Beth, Elizabeth died at a young age -- possibly as an after effect of the scarlet fever of which she had been "cured." 

The fourth stone, "AMA" marks the grave of mother Abigail May Alcott, on whom the character Marmee is based. Abby, as she was called, was the great niece of Dorothy Quincy, wife of founding father John Hancock. Abby fought injustice in many areas: poverty, abolition, and women's rights. 

Because her husband, Bronson, rarely earned enough to support a wife and four daughters, let alone the students and associates he often brought home, Abby struggled heroically to keep the family afloat -- working for neighbors, taking in boarders, borrowing from relatives and friends (usually Emerson), working as one of Boston's first professional social workers (the inspiration for Louisa May's novel Work), and even serving for several months as matron of a sanitarium in Maine.  Not until Louisa May's literary success did Abby experience financial security. 

Abby was the glue that held the Alcott family together. When she died in 1877, William Lloyd Garrison spoke at her funeral and Louisa May wrote: that she "was so loyal, tender, and true, life was hard for her and no one knew all she had to bear but her children."

Before we proceed to the fifth stone, Bronson's, look at the two stones joined like Siamese twins in the cemetery plot to the right rear of the Alcott plot. (They're at the extreme right edge of Photo 1, just above the tree stump.) 

The left twin stone is for Anna Bronson Alcott Pratt, the oldest of the four sisters and the model for Little Women's Meg. Anna's wedding to John Bridge Pratt (under the right twin), that took place in the parlor of [Photo 6], was the template for Meg's wedding in the novel. John and Anna had two sons.  When John died, after just ten years of marriage, Louisa May directed that the royalties of her novel Little Men be used to support the two boys.

Finally, the gravestone at the right end of the front row, "ABA." It marks the grave of the father, Amos Bronson Alcott, though he was not born with that name. His surname at birth was Alcox. As a young man, he changed it to Alcott and dropped his first name, signing his name for the rest of his life as "A. Bronson Alcott," called Bronson by his friends.

Bronson was, of course, "Father," "Mr. March," in Little Women, and a leading Transcendentalist in real life. He was also a strong abolitionist, an educator ahead-of-his-time, and a philosopher and "conversationalist." His friend Thoreau called him "the last of the philosophers" and "perhaps the sanest man . . . of any I chance to know." When Bronson was elected to Harvard University's Phi Beta Kappa society and questioned whether he belonged among such scholars, his friend Emerson told him, "You are a member by right of genius." Yet both Henry and Waldo might also agree with many historians that Bronson was an impractical idealist and improvident visionary. 

As an educator, Bronson established the Temple School in a Masonic Temple in Boston. There, in spacious, airy rooms with light streaming through Gothic windows, he courteously engaged his young students in Socratic conversations on the reasons for learning, as well as teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic, public speaking, and the life of Jesus. All the education was conducted using Transcendentalist principles or, "divine intuition," drawing out the child's intuitive knowledge through encouragement, not criticism or coercion. Bronson used many of the same methods in home-schooling his own daughters.

The demise of the Temple School began when Bronson published Conversations with Children on the Gospels. In it, against the advice of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (who brought kindergartens to America) and her sister Sophia (later to be Sophia Hawthorne), he included some of his rather abstract teachings on conception and birth and how love makes babies, as well as some of the named children's views on such matters. Sex education! This drew editorial attacks, some linking his "filthy and godless jargon" to the whole Transcendentalist movement. Creditors who had funded the school suddenly wanted their money back. Temple School was suddenly downsized to a single, windowless, basement room. Shortly thereafter it closed and Bronson taught the few remaining students in his Boston home. Three years later, Bronson's admitted Susan Robinson, an African American, to his classes. A racially integrated school! A few weeks later, when Bronson refused to dismiss Susan, his other students were withdrawn from the classes. Thus ended the Temple School chapter of Bronson's life.

In the spring of 1843, influenced by his English friend Charles Lane, Bronson moved the Alcott family to a farm in Harvard, MA, about 14 miles west of Concord.  There they began a utopian community they called Fruitlands, a community we might call a commune. "If we can collect about us the true men and women," Abby wrote, "I know not why we may not live the true life, putting away the evil customs of society and leading quiet exemplary lives...." The land was beautiful and the weather pleasant as they and a dozen or so others in their "Consociate Family" planted a wide variety of grains and vegetables. They were strictly vegetarian -- no meat, fish, eggs, milk, or cheese. were to be consumed. They used no animal products -- no wool clothing, no leather shoes -- and no animal labor (except, according to Abby, that of women). They wore linen rather than cotton, as cotton was picked by slaves.  Charles Lane encouraged sexual abstinence in the community, but cold showers, poetry, philosophical discussions, recitations, reading quietly and reading aloud abounded. 

Scores of visitors dropped by to aid with the plowing or just to see and admire the apparently successful Consociate Family. After his visit, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "The sun and the evening sky do not look calmer than Alcott and his family at Fruitlands.  They seemed to have arrived at the fact, to have got rid of the show, & so to be serene...." But he added presciently, "They look well in July. We shall see them in December."

The fall harvest was meager. Bronson's and Lane's lecture tours that kept them away from Fruitlands at critical times may have played a part. Snow came early; food and wood supplies were running low; a key creditor was backing out; and Consociate Family members left. By November, only the Alcotts and Lanes remained, and some members of those families were ill. December was colder; by Christmas the snows were constant and heavy. Lane's departure from Fruitlands in early January drove Bronson into a deep depression and close to death. On January 10, "having ate our last bit and burned our last chip," Abby wrote, a neighbor helped the Alcotts to leave Fruitlands. Thus ended the great Consociate Family experiment. Transcendental Wild Oats is Louisa May's reminiscence Fruitlands.

After Fruitlands, the Alcotts lived in Concord (in a house on Lexington Road, a house that Bronson called Hillside and the Hawthornes later bought and called the Wayside); then in Boston; and finally back in Concord where they settled in Orchard House [Photo 6]  Emerson played a key roll in supporting the family -- financially, psychologically and socially -- and in drawing Bronson into the center of the Transcendentalist group. For about five years, Bronson served as the Concord's Superintendent of Schools. He encouraged teachers to adopt progressive educational methods and promoted students' self expression and educational field trips. 

Bronson built a School of Philosophy [Photo 7] behind Orchard House for lectures and "conversations." (Educational events are held there even today!) In Concord, in Boston, and in other eastern states, he taught Transcendentalist ideas through conversations on topics like religion, civility, friendship, silence, and the history of man. He lead a course of "Conversations on Modern Life" at the Harvard Divinity School where one of his students was Franklin Sanborn.

In 1882 Bronson suffered a stroke. Frank Sanborn was eulogist at his death in 1888. Two days later Louisa May followed him. 

For much, much more about the fascinating Alcott family, visit Orchard House and read The Alcotts: Biography of a Family by Madelon Bedell.

Harry Beyer, a licensed town guide, has lived and walked in Concord since 1966.