Literary

Visit the Concord Free Public Library for a glance into our amazing history. Filled with art, sculpture and a special collection that includes the original manuscript of Little Women, you won’t want to miss this.

The Concord Museum, at 53 Cambridge Turnpike, has a collection of artifacts used on the day the American Revolution began: Muskets, powder horns, flints, and of course, one of the two lanterns that Paul Revere had placed in the steeple of Boston’s Old North Church to signal the patriots of the advance of the Redcoats. (Other periods of Concord history are represented, too, including Henry David Thoreau’s desk and other items, and Native American stone tools going back 10,000 years.) Watch the Museum’s website for an all-new exhibit opening in 2021 that tells the story of April 19, 1775.

This location is where Louisa May Alcott wrote her classic novel, Little Women, inspired by her own growing up in Concord with her sisters. Guides in period dress take visitors through rooms of original furniture and personal possessions.

at 28 Cambridge Turnpike is preserved by his family and contains Emerson’s original furniture and objects, much as he left it. (Open seasonally)

at 269 Monument St., was built by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandparents, and you can take a tour to the room where Emerson himself wrote his first book, Nature. Years later, in the same room, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the story that gave the house its name: Mosses from an Old Manse.

This location was named by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived here in the 1850s and 60s, but in the 1840s it had been home to a teenage Louisa May Alcott, and another author, Harriet Lothrop (pen name Margaret Sidney), would live here later in the 1800s. (Open seasonally)