Orchard House opened to the public on May 27, 1912, and you're looking at the Alcott family's longtime home. This was the longtime home of Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) and his family, including his daughter Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), who wrote and set her novel Little Women (1868–69) here. The four daughters — Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and Abigail — lived in Orchard House from 1858 to 1877; Anna was the oldest, Louisa one year younger, Elizabeth three years younger than Louisa, and Abigail the youngest, five years younger than Elizabeth.
The house you face was first built sometime between 1690 and 1720. The Alcotts first moved to Concord in 1840, left in 1843 to start Fruitlands, a utopian agrarian commune in nearby Harvard, then returned in 1845 and bought a house called Hillside, which they sold in 1852 to Nathaniel Hawthorne who renamed it The Wayside. The family returned again in 1857 and moved into this two-story clapboard farmhouse in the spring of 1858.
At the time of purchase the site included two early eighteenth-century houses on a 12-acre (49,000 m2) apple orchard. Notice the 12-acre apple orchard stretching beyond the house.