The Emerson family has been welcoming tourists since the mid-nineteenth century, when writer and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson personally greeted visitors in his study. Emerson’s house, at the Lexington Road and Cambridge Turnpike intersection, was convenient to the Boston stagecoach and remains today only a short walk away from the railroad depot. The Emerson family resided in the home from September 1835, when Ralph Waldo married his second wife, Lidian, until their eldest daughter Ellen’s death in 1909. They received an extensive community of progressive reformers and writers, as well as literary fans and curiosity seekers drawn to Emerson’s fame and persona. The family’s cook, Nancy Colesworthy, reportedly threatened to hang a sign on the fence proclaiming, “The House is not a Hotel.”ⁱ Ellen was hostess to many of the casual visitors, who came to meet Emerson or glimpse his writing study, and later caretakers gave tours of the house even before it opened as a museum (owned and operated by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association) in the early 1930s. 

Emerson’s writing table, adorned with a vase of pear blossoms, flowering almond, and Japanese quince from the house gardens.

| Courtesy of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association

Preserved by generations of the Emerson family, the house’s layout is much as it was at the end of Emerson’s life. Original furnishings, art, and artifacts, including clothing, are exhibited; allowing visitors to experience the spaces where Emerson wrote, spent time with his contemporaries, and shared a life with his family and closest friends, such as the Alcotts and Henry David Thoreau, who lived with the family for several years. 

Tours begin in the recently restored Emerson barn, the site of a school attended by the Emerson and Alcott children, now open to the public through visitor programming. A tour of the house includes the first-floor guest bedroom, frequented by Emerson’s close friend and colleague Margaret Fuller. Visitors to the house are invited to sit in a replica of Emerson’s study (the original is exhibited across the street at the Concord Museum) furnished with family pieces, including objects used by Emerson in earlier periods of his occupancy. In 2022, the museum staff is excited to share newly opened spaces with visitors.  

The landscape — with fruit trees, Lidian Emerson’s flower gardens, and an original Concord grape vine — offers opportunities for nature exploring, as does the nearby Emerson-Thoreau amble, which follows the family’s regular route to Walden Pond. 

Offering an intimate sense of place at the heart of Emerson’s life and work, the house, in its centrality to Concord life and global resonance, evokes interconnected human stories waiting to be discovered. 

After being closed for two years, the Emerson House is once again welcoming visitors. The house is open for guided tours Thursdays to Sundays through October. For more information, please visit ralphwaldoemersonhouse.org.    

i Ellen Emerson, The Life of Lidian Emerson. Delores Bird Carpenter., Ed. (Michigan State University Press, 1992), 71.