Orchard House on Lexington Road is the home where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women and lived with her family from 1858 to 1877. The house is preserved essentially as it was in the Alcotts' time — the family's furniture and possessions are still in place, the rooms unchanged, and the guided tours that wind through the house give a genuine sense of the overcrowded, intellectually fervent household that the novel describes.
Bronson Alcott was one of the Concord Transcendentalists, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, and the household was at the centre of the movement's intellectual life — conversations, visits, and debates were constant. Louisa paid the bills. Tours are the only way to see the interior and are offered regularly throughout the day; they are conducted by guides who know the family's history in detail and bring the characters of the novel to life in a way that the rooms alone cannot. The property is a National Historic Landmark managed by the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.