Fruitlands

Fruitlands is a simple two-story farmhouse of the late 18th century on Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, overlooking the Nashua Valley. It has a five-bay facade, red weatherboard siding, a low stone foundation, a central chimney and a slate gable roof. In 1843 it became the home of a short-lived utopian community led by Bronson Alcott, with Charles Lane, an Englishman who bought the house and about 90 acres. Residents included the Alcott family, among them Louisa May, and never numbered more than sixteen. They followed a strict regimen of vegetarian eating, linen clothing and no private property, and tilled the land by spade. Visitors included Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau. Disagreements over the role of the family, a hard first winter and crop failure ended the experiment, and the Alcotts left in January 1844. The house remains on its original site, appears much as it did then, and now serves as a museum with displays on the Transcendentalist movement.