Thoreau Country: Location Note

Thoreau-Alcott House  (The Yellow House)

For me, this is the most memorable house in Concord. At 255 Main Street is "the yellow house," where both the Thoreau and Alcott families lived. It is still standing and is a private home, though in 1948 the Alcott heirs offered it to the Thoreau Society (see). Here Thoreau lived (in the finished attic) almost a third of his life, more than any other place. In that room, from 1850, he wrote much of Walden, many of his essays, and most of his wonderful journal. And here (in the parlor to the right of the front door) he died in 1862.

According to Raymond Borst's Thoreau Log (1992) on page 157, John Thoreau purchased the "Yellow House" ... on Sept. 29, 1849, but the family did not move in until Aug. 29,1850, because Mrs. Thoreau wanted some repairs. (See, TSB, 24 (July 1948): p. 1; and Harding's The Days of HT [1963] on p. 263.)

In 1890, Concord's Frank Sanborn wrote, in an article that accompanied this drawing by Miss Florence W. Richardson, "The trees around this house, as shown in the engraving, were nearly all planted by Thoreau; the projecting L with the chimney contained, in its upper story, the shop where the Thoreau family made lead pencils and prepared plumbago for electrotyping, -- which was the modest bread-winning occupation of Henry Thoreau's father, and which he handed down to his children." Click here for Ruth Wheeler's interesting history of the house and the Thoreau-Alcott occupancy.

This window illuminates Concord's most important literary and personal room, in my opinion. Here was the finished attic room where Thoreau lived and wrote for the last dozen years of his life. And where he would keep his stuff-- his journals, a mouse skull, his unsold books, his botany specimens, his books on natural history and oriental philosophy, and whatever else caught his interest. I hope that this attic room can be restored to the way it was when Thoreau lived there. (Apparently it was divided into smaller rooms during the Alcott's tenure, but Mary Fenn reported in the 1970s that the basic structure was unchanged.) [Photo by S. Ells from Jim and Carol Dwyer's back yard, 1998.]

Directly opposite the house, during Thoreau's lifetime, stood the house of his companion-contemporary Ellery Channing, whose garden ran to the river bank. Said Sanborn, "And there under a rank of tall willows, Thoreau kept his last boat."

This house was purchased by Louisa Alcott, in 1877, after the death of Sophia Thoreau, the last of the Thoreau children. It was the home of the Alcott family for nearly ten years. According to Sanborn, Mrs. Alcott died there in October, 1877, and Mr. Alcott there suffered in October, 1882, the paralytic stroke from which he never fully recovered. He left this house in 1886.

 The right wing visible in the picture was built by the Alcotts, some say by father Bronson for his library, some say by daughter Louisa Mae for her writing. [Ref: Sanborn, F. B. "Emerson and His Friends in Concord." New England Magazine (new series v. 3)9:4 (1890): p. 427. Richardson drawing from Cornell Memories of America Collection. Photo ca. 1900 from Library of Congress Collection.]

In 1948, the Alcott-Pratt heirs offered the Thoreau-Alcott House to the Thoreau Society for $25,000. Unfortunately, the Society could not raise the money. In 1988, when the house next came on the market, it was offered for $1.1 million! The 1988 advertisement is below (with Walter Harding's comment from  the 1988 Thoreau Society Bulletin #181).

[Page prepared by S. Ells, March 9, 2002. <http://idisk.mac.com/sfe/Sites/henry/index.html>.]