Jo March Was Born Here
A slide-show tour of the homes of famous children’s authors.
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Where the March Sisters Lived
Louisa May Alcott lived with her parents and three sisters in Orchard House in Concord, Mass., when she was in her 20s and 30s. She set her best-known novel, Little Women, in that sprawling house, which means it is also the “home” of heroine Jo March. Alcott wrote the novel sitting at a handmade half-moon desk in her bedroom—those are her windows on the upper right. Each year more than 50,000 visitors tour the home, which is maintained by the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.
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Louisa May Alcott’s Childhood Home
The Wayside, one of Alcott's childhood homes—others included a farming commune and a basement apartment in Boston—is right next door to Orchard House and maintained by the National Park Service. The most common claim is that this is where Alcott staged the March sisters’ elaborate production of Roderigo, detailed in Chapter 2. After the Alcotts moved, the Wayside would become home to Nathaniel Hawthorne and, decades later, to Harriett Lothrop, who wrote the Five Little Peppers series under the name Margaret Sidney.
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The Little House Wayside
This replica cabin is located about seven miles outside of Pepin, Wis., on the site of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1867 birth. Downtown Pepin is also home to a somewhat ramshackle Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum. (The museum at Wilder’s final home in Mansfield, Mo., offers a clearer overview of her life.) The more satisfying attraction is the “Little House Wayside,” seen here. The site is a simple park carved into farmland, with a reproduction of the Little House in the Woods itself. Visitors simply drive up and poke around the site on their own.
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Wagon Near Ingalls Homestead Site
DeSmet, S.D., population 1,051, is a town whose main industry is Laura Ingalls Wilder. A late-19th-century pioneer aesthetic runs from town to the Ingalls homestead site, near where this photo was taken. Wilder set six books, including The Long Winter, in DeSmet, the town she and her family called home at several different points in the 1880s and 1890s. Tourists can also visit the Surveyor’s House, the original Ingalls home built downtown by “Pa” Ingalls, and a cemetery with graves of several family members.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder Schoolhouse
This schoolhouse in DeSmet was attended by Laura and her sister Carrie when they were young girls. The interior is currently under renovation by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, a 53-year-old organization that has acquired several buildings in DeSmet over the years. The schoolhouse, built in the early 1880s, was moved across town to the society’s land in 2007, and restoration—including removal of wallpaper and the preservation of an original blackboard complete with marks—is ongoing.
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Caddie Woodlawn’s House
Downsville, Wis., was home in the early 19th century to a young tomboy named Caroline Watkins. In 1936, Caroline's granddaughter Carol Ryrie Brink immortalized her in Caddie Woodlawn. Caroline’s original childhood home was moved in 1970 about 300 yards from its original site. It has been slowly restored by the Dunn County Historical Society and a group of local volunteers, including two men—a master carpenter and contractor—who performed work on the interior as part of a community-service agreement.
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Where Betsy and Tacy Played
This is the Mankato, Minn., girlhood home of author Maud Hart Lovelace and also the home of Betsy, the heroine of Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series. Published in the 1940s and 1950s, the books focused on the adventures of two best friends at the turn of the century. The house is maintained by the Betsy-Tacy Society, a group that is surprisingly active considering the relative obscurity of the books. That may change: Harper Collins just reissued the last six books in the series with new forewords by Meg Cabot and Anna Quindlen.
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Betsy’s Piano
The Betsy-Tacy Society has done significant restoration on the house, which was built in 1892. Major renovations are now on hold because of the economic climate, however. In the meantime, the 1,200-member organization focuses on collecting furniture and artifacts to outfit the main floor of Betsy's house—including the front parlor, seen here—as a museum.
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Ramona the Pest
Big cities generally make less of a fuss over their hometown literary heroes than small towns do. Beverly Cleary's beloved Ramona Quimby grew up in 1950s Portland, and it's trickier in contemporary Portland than it is in, say, Pepin, to uncover the character's stomping grounds. This statue of Ramona splashing in a puddle—a scene from Ramona the Pest—is located in the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden in Grant Park, four blocks from the street where Cleary placed Ramona’s house. A bronze Henry Huggins and Ribsy the dog frolic nearby.
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10 of 10 Ramona’s Street
Ramona lived in a rented, red-roofed house on Klickitat Street. This is the street between NE 32nd and NE 33rd Avenues—Ramona’s block, according to the map featured on Cleary’s own Web site. Cleary grew up on nearby 37th Avenue, but she placed Ramona on Klickitat because she liked the sound of the word. The exact location of Ramona’s house is under dispute: One book mentions that she lives at Klickitat and 28th Avenue, but in reality a school is located there. Sometimes the “real” site remains just out of grasp.
