Emily Dickinson Museum

The Homestead and the Evergreens — Dickinson's birthplace, home and bedroom

The Emily Dickinson Museum is two adjacent 19th-century houses: the Homestead, where the poet was born in 1830 and lived for most of her life, and the Evergreens next door, where her brother Austin lived with his wife Susan. Both have been preserved with their original furnishings, including remarkable original wallpapers, and the gardens that Dickinson loved have been replanted with the species she grew.

Tours are guided and take about ninety minutes — buy tickets online in advance, especially in summer and around the Dickinson Festival in August. The bedroom tour is the emotional centre of the visit; sitting on a wooden chair where Dickinson wrote I dwell in Possibility is the kind of literary pilgrimage that justifies the trip on its own.

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A story
Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems in the small upstairs bedroom on the south side of the Homestead, most of them on scraps of paper later sewn together into hand-made *fascicles*. Only about ten were published in her lifetime. The room is preserved with her writing desk, the little white dress she wore daily, and a basket she used to lower notes down to children playing in the garden.