Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her LIfe, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

From The Alcotts as I Knew Them (1909)

From The Alcotts as I Knew Them (1909) Clara Gowing Published in 1909, Clara Gowing’s remembrances of the Alcotts in Concord focus primarily on the 1840s and 1850s, when she grew up with the two older Alcott sisters. She was the same age as Louisa, having been born in 1832 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the daughter of Jabez and Hitty Eames Gowing. Her connection to Concord was a strong one; both of her grandfathers had been at the Concord fight in April 1775. Gowing, educated in Concord, grew up to be a teacher and occasional writer. She taught at schools for black children in Lynchburg and Alexandria, Virginia, and in Nashville, Tennessee. Employed for a time by the State Primary School in Massachusetts, Gowing was, for over a decade, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Reading, Massachusetts, where she lived. Clearly, the arrival of the Alcotts to Gowing’s “East Quarter” neighborhood of Concord in spring 1845 was something to remember . As she recalls, Bronson had been in the village “long enough to acquire the reputation of being a fanatic in belief and habit”; he was “supposed to be something entirely unorthodox.” While Gowing notes how different the Alcott girls were from others in their beliefs and education, she also portrays them as ordinary and easily accepted into the Concord children’s daily life. She gives us vivid scenes of Louisa before writing became her focus, a rare glimpse into a life filled with frolic and games, despite little money. The account of the “postoffice,” where the girls left messages for each other, provides the autobiographical foundation for the “P.O.” in Little Women, and her description of Louisa instantly calls to mind the fictional Jo March: “She was . . . in character a strange combination of kindness and perseverance, full of fun, with a keen sense of the ludicrous, apt speech and ready wit; a subject of moods, than whom no one could be jollier and more entertaining when geniality was in ascendency , but if the opposite, let her best friend beware.” In the spring of 1845 the usually tranquil neighborhood in Concord, Massachusetts , known as the “East Quarter,” was somewhat agitated by learning that Mr. A. Bronson Alcott had purchased a place in that part of the town, which he would occupy with his family. [133] * Previous to this he had been a citizen of the town long enough to acquire the reputation of being a fanatic in belief and habit, and he had recently come from a community of Transcendentalists in Harvard, Massachusetts. (What the term Transcendentalist really meant was not generally understood, but it was supposed to be something entirely unorthodox.) He attended no church, had been arrested for not paying his taxes because he would not support a government so false to the law of love as that which was advocated in the Boston papers, eschewed all animal food, and had attempted to do without everything the use of which cost the life of the creature, such as leather for boots and shoes, and oil for burning; and he carried his anti-slavery principles so far as to give up sugar and molasses made at the South, also cotton, or anything produced by slave labor. In a family of restricted means it was found rather impracticable to carry out all these ideas, and when they came to the “East Quarter” they used oil for light, cotton goods and sugar, and yielding to the wife’s and children’s requirement, milk. The place he purchased, about a mile from the village, consisted of several acres of land and a two-story house standing quite near the main road, with the front door in the middle, on which was an old-fashioned knocker. A wheelwright’s shop was on one side of the house, and a barn on the opposite side of the road, with a high hill covered with trees for a background. Over this hill a part of the British troops marched when they entered and left Concord on the memorable 19th of April, 1775, the hill being on the north side of the road from Lexington to Concord and extending for a mile, ending just beyond the old church. To use Mrs. Alcott’s own words, “we moved the barn across the road, cut the shop in two and put a half on each end of the house.” On each L so formed was a piazza with a door opening into the...