The Fire at Emerson House

In the early morning of July 24, 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson awoke to the sound of an unidentified crackling noise. Through a crack in the wall, he saw that it was a fire, which quickly spread when a closet door was opened. Going to the smoke-filled attic, Emerson and his wife Lidian tried unsuccessfully to put the fire out and it quickly became clear that they needed help. Emerson ran to his front gate and yelled “Fire! Whitcomb! Staples! Fire!” Staples and Whitcomb were neighbors and the first to arrive on the scene.

Emerson’s only entry in his journal on July 24:, “House burned.”

Unfortunately, the Emerson’s grown children were not there to assist their frightened and worried parents. Ellen was visiting in Beverly, (she returned quickly), Edward was in Europe and Edith was living with her husband and children in Milton, MA.

Before the fire was able to reach the lower floors, in addition to extinguishing the fire, the priorities were to remove Emerson’s papers, his books, artwork, and the family’s furniture and clothes. Staples started the removals, quickly joined by other neighbors. Whitcomb stayed at the gate directing the first responders and continuing to send out the alarm.

Word quickly spread. Ellen Emerson wrote, “there were ten men there in five or ten minutes.” She described (from neighbor reports) the clearing of her room, “…Arthur [Gray] ran straight to my room, even then the smoke was so bad he had to hold his breath, saw my pictures, thought how I must value them and took down all but Fisher boy…” Further she wrote, “Louisa Alcott & May attended to letters…there were any quantity of them lying around and they collected them...”

Ellen’s feelings on seeing the house still standing after the fire were mixed. “…our house is associated to me with dirt, waste, bottomless abysses of expense to no profit…” On the other hand, she continued “I love the house…So when I saw the house I had supposed forever lost, standing safely in its old shape among the healthy untouched trees, I was very thankful.”

Word quickly spread. Ellen Emerson wrote, “there were ten men there in five or ten minutes.” She described (from neighbor reports) the clearing of her room, “…Arthur [Gray] ran straight to my room, even then the smoke was so bad he had to hold his breath, saw my pictures, thought how I must value them and took down all but Fisher boy…” Further she wrote, “Louisa Alcott & May attended to letters…there were any quantity of them lying around and they collected them...”

Ellen’s feelings on seeing the house still standing after the fire were mixed. “…our house is associated to me with dirt, waste, bottomless abysses of expense to no profit…” On the other hand, she continued “I love the house…So when I saw the house I had supposed forever lost, standing safely in its old shape among the healthy untouched trees, I was very thankful.”

One hundred and fifty years later, Emerson’s home – called either Bush or Coolidge Castle by the family (Emerson bought the house from the Coolidges) – still stands with the structure intact and filled with the original furnishings. The last Emerson to occupy the house was Ellen, who died in 1909. Since then, direct descendants own and manage the property for visitors to enjoy.

Emerson’s Impact on Concord

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s personal association with Concord began in his childhood through visits to his Grandparents at their home now known as the Old Manse. In October, 1834 when he was thirty-one-years-old, he moved into the Old Manse with his mother and one of his brothers.

Following his marriage to Lydia Jackson in 1835, Emerson and his wife settled permanently in Concord. They moved into the home he purchased on the Cambridge Turnpike, where he lived for the rest of his life. Emerson significantly impacted the life of the town, through his engagement with its intellectual life and its social institutions, and his involvement with social reform movements.

Concord’s fields, farms and woods influenced Emerson’s decision to move to the town. Over time he purchased more than 40 acres of land around his home and at Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau built his cabin. Walden Pond is less than two miles from Emerson’s home and often the destination of his daily walks.

In 1835 Concord was a small but active community of 2,021 citizens. Agriculture was the leading industry but manufacturing was also robust with a cotton mill, two sawmills, two gristmills, a pencil factory and a book bindery. Concord’s Lyceum was one of the first in New England, established in 1828. Lyceums were a form of adult education and entertainment, which provided lectures, debates, and discussions, supported by volunteers within the community. During his residency, Emerson was the Concord Lyceum’s most frequent speaker.

For Concord’s 1837 Fourth of July celebration Emerson contributed a hymn for the day’s exercises. The first stanza celebrated the national significance of the 1775 battle at the town’s North Bridge:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here, once, the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The verse is now known as the Concord Hymn.

The citizens of Concord welcomed Emerson’s involvement in various activities. In 1837 he joined the Social Circle, a group of 25 farmers and townsmen. Meetings of the Social Circle were designed to share conversations in the members’ homes during the winter months. It enabled Emerson to get to know his neighbors (and they him), which otherwise would have been difficult with his demanding schedule. He also served on Concord’s School Committee; the Cemetery Committee (he delivered the keynote address at the dedication of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery); as a director of the Concord Atheneum (Concord’s library until 1851); and on the Library Committee.

Even with his extensive involvement in community activities, the greatest impact Emerson had on the town was his ability to draw some of the leading writers, educators and reformers to his home.

Emerson’s poems, essays and lectures significantly interested America’s literary elite. Writers that visited or moved to Concord included Louisa May Alcott (with her family), James Elliot Cabot, Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. Thoreau was born in Concord but was so drawn to Emerson that he lived with the family for more than two years.

As a strong proponent of education for all, Emerson had extensive meetings in his home with progressive educators Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, Elizabeth Peabody and Sarah Alden Ripley.

The nineteenth century was a period of upheaval and agitation for reform on many fronts, including the abolition of slavery. Emerson actively spoke against slavery, including addressing the citizens of Concord on May 3, 1851 on the Fugitive Slave Law. He and his wife’s active participation attempting to drive change in the treatment of blacks and native Americans brought John Brown, Mary Merrick Brooks, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Frederick Hedge Theodore Parker and Daniel Webster to Emerson’s Concord home.

To learn more about this remarkable man, his ideas, and his impact on nineteenth century arts and social reforms you can take a guided tour of the Emerson House. Walking through the rooms his family used every day enables visitors to see the many books, art and family items that characterized their daily lives. We hope you will visit soon!

Consider the Sibyls

“Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it…. Painting was called ‘silent poetry,’ and poetry ‘speaking painting.’ The laws of each art are controvertible into the laws of every other.

Herein we have an explanation of the necessity that reigns in all the kingdom of Art. Arising out of eternal Reason, one and perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary.”

—-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Art,” in Society and Solitude

Ralph Waldo Emerson was well versed in classic poetry and philosophy, a literature rich with heroic, mythic, and sacred figures. And he admired Renaissance art, particularly works by Michelangelo and Raphael inspired by the vast iconography of the ancient world. Among the images of heroes, angels, and gods at the Emerson House are prints of five famous portraits of sibyls by Italian painters.

Wise, clairvoyant, and powerful, the sibyls were legendary female prophets named after places in the Old World, for example the renowned “Oracle of Delphi.” Sibyls are typically pictured with an open book, in the act of reading or writing, and thus associated with both received wisdom as well as intuitive, even divine knowledge. In art and literature, sibyls are often physically powerful as well—muscular, Amazonian, colossal. (In a modern context, the Statue of Liberty may be aptly described as a sibyl.)

Michelangelo’s epic fresco on the ceiling of Rome’s Sistine Chapel is the original source of three prints of sibyls at the Emerson House today: The Libyan sibyl is prominently displayed in the Study; the Cumaean and Eritrean are placed one above the other in a corner of the Parlor. Students of the classics may recognize the fearsome Cumaean sibyl, made famous in the Aeneid when she encourages the young hero to persevere in the face of enormous difficulties. Each of these sibyls appear among Old Testament prophets in the early 16th-century masterpiece.

A later work, Raphael’s famous group portrait of “Four Sibyls,” arranges the Cumaean, Persian, Phrygian, and Tibertine sibyls within a graceful half-moon arch, or “lunette.” This print is also in the Parlor, over the mantle. Originally commissioned for the Chapel of Santa Maria Della Pace in Rome, it is also known as “Sibyls Receiving Instructions From Angels.”

Like Michelangelo’s program of sibyls and biblical prophets, Raphael’s tableau of earthbound sibyls alongside ethereal angels conflates older, pagan myths with Christian Rome.

Sibyls occasionally appear in Emerson’s writing, notably in his important poem, The Problem, where their words persist in Nature itself:

"The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold
Still floats upon the morning wind
Still whispers to the willing mind.”

In The Mind on Fire, the Emerson biographer Robert Richardson traced Emerson’s interest in the sibyls to his immersion in Persian poetry and Eastern texts, around the time he purchased these prints in 1846 from the Boston publisher Little, Brown. Richardson concluded that “Emerson hung the pictures partly out of interest in the Old Masters and partly from interest in the sibyls themselves, corresponding as they did, perhaps, with some of the strongest influences in his own life.” This suggests the sibyls may have reminded Emerson of the strong, intelligent women who contributed to his own intellectual development; these include his widowed mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson, his father’s sister, Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt by marriage, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley—and of course his wife Lidian Jackson Emerson.

The placement of the sibyls prints seems to confirm a connection between education and female influence. For example, consider the fifth sibyl, a print of the Persian sibyl (from a painting by Guercino, a third Renaissance painter). Hung over the mantle in daughter Edith’s bedroom, this classically beautiful, turbaned sibyl leans gently on her hand at a writing desk—and appears more of a thoughtful matriarch than a high priestess. She looks directly across the room to Raphael’s Madonna of the Book (“La Vierge au Livre”); this maternal image subtly echoes the theme of female wisdom, depicting as it does a young mother holding in her arms a child, and an open book.

The Spring 2022 Opening of the Ralph Waldo Emerson House

Ralph Waldo Emerson purchased his home on the Cambridge Turnpike in 1835 and lived there until his passing in 1882. His wife Lidian – they were married in 1835 – remained until her death in 1892 and their daughter Ellen until 1909. Since then, ownership of the house and property continues to be held by Emerson direct descendants – through the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association.

Reopening April 28, 2022
Visitors have a unique opportunity to experience Emerson’s home much as he left it with his original furnishings, art, books and household items. The tour starts in the barn, renovated in 2020, and then moves into the house. This year we will be walking through rooms on the first and second floors.

Tour highlights include Emerson’s study where he wrote, read extensively and met with writers and artists including Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Margaret Fuller and sculptor Daniel Chester French. The parlor, where the Transcendental Club met, features paintings of his two daughters Ellen and Edith. Visitors will hear and see additional remembrances while touring through the dining room, and rooms on the second floor.

A Museum for 92 Years
The Emerson house first opened for visitors in 1930. Since then, the tours have evolved to embrace more about his life and legacy, his impact on a young country (the U.S.) establishing its literary place in history, and his belief in the individual. His poems and essays still resonate with readers because of their continued relevancy.

Memorable events over the years include:
The Bicentennial of Emerson’s birth in May 2003, included the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society’s sponsorship of exhibits, a conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a gala reception at the Concord Museum and the creation of the book Emerson Bicentennial Essays. Additionally, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association hosted the Society and other groups and published a brochure, created by Bay Bancroft (great-great Emerson granddaughter) and Eliza Castaneda.

Concord’s 375th birthday (founded in 1635) featured a major parade including an Emerson House float.

The Emerson barn renovation in 2020 was designed to preserve the structure for future generations. In Emerson’s lifetime the barn was used alternatively as a school, a place for boarders, and the coverage for animals and carriages. The barn was expanded twice by 1882. Recently the Concord Museum featured the barn in the 2021 Holiday House tour.

We look forward to welcoming new and repeat visitors this year!

Tumbledown Hall

173 years ago, on August 12, 1847, Bronson Alcott, assisted by Henry David Thoreau, began work building an "arbour" for Emerson. The ambitious two-storied gothic structure was intended to be a summer study for Emerson. It was constructed in a fanciful style, preserving the natural curvatures in the building materials he gathered from the woods. Alcott pride himself that this characteristic was "original" to himself as an amateur architect. Thoreau, who worked as a surveyor, found opportunity for merriment in Alcott's disregard for the mathematics of engineering in preference to his aesthetic sensibilities and philosophical ideals. Alcott noted in his journals that his project had become a subject of curiosity in the neighborhood. The Emersons called the summerhouse "Tumbledown Hall" and "The Ruin." Despite the humor, the structure stood for at least fifteen years, although it unfortunately was not well used due to heat and bugs.

Fire at Emerson’s House

On July 24, 1872, the home of the Emersons caught fire, starting in the garret (attic). With the immediate help of neighbors, most of the family’s possessions were removed and the house – with considerable damage – was saved. Among the neighbors were Louisa May Alcott and sister May, who gathered up Emerson’s letters and manuscripts, which were thrown all over the lawn. Emerson wrote in his Journal of the event: Wednesday, July 24, “House burned.”

Daughter Ellen, who was not there, wrote on seeing the damage, “I love this house…so when I saw this house I had supposed forever lost, standing safely in its old shape among healthy untouched trees, I was very thankful.”