| Interment Location | Visited | |
|---|---|---|
| Concord, MA | August 30, 2010 |
A litany of literary luminaries are laid to rest upon Authors Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. These authors and philosophers were contemporaries whose lives intersected with one another in nineteenth century Concord. Most got along gloriously, but not all. Transcendentalist writer and educator A. Bronson Alcott was known to avert his gaze whenever he crossed paths with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Therein lies the irony that their mortal remains are interred mere feet from each other. The Hawthorne plot appears in the foreground of this photograph, and Alcott’s grave is shown in the center, just across the paved pathway.
The reverse side of the Alcott monument lists the names and lifespans of Bronson and his nuclear family: his wife, Abba, and their four daughters — Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May. Anna was a teacher, and May was an artist. Elizabeth died at age 22 of scarlet fever. The second eldest, Louisa, used her kin as the basis for her semi-biographical, but fictionalized Little Women series of books.
The progressive Alcott placed a high value on education — not only for his daughters, but for all people. In 1879, he and Ralph Waldo Emerson partnered with educators Franklin Sanborn and William Torrey Harris to establish the Concord School of Philosophy. Interpretive signage that was affixed to the Hillside Chapel schoolhouse when I visited it in 2022 opined it was “one of the first and most successful adult education centers in the country[.]” The institution functioned in the spirit of Plato’s Academy in Athens, Greece — people of similar interests engaged in open dialogue and listened to lectures by speakers such as Julia Ward Howe. Participants — more than half of whom were women — traveled from as far as Europe to engage in educational discourse at the Hillside Chapel. Alcott was the school’s dean, and it ceased operations when he died in 1888.
Fast Facts
Born: November 29, 1799 in Wolcott, Connecticut
Died: March 4, 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts
Age: 88
Interment: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts
"Education is the art of arts; the secret of Deity; comprehending those Knowledges, Cultures, disciplines, by which the Soul is incarnated, edified, deified. A divine man, the educator becomes a maker of men, reproducing in his pupils the divinity builded and imaged in himself. He is the Word, incarnating, inspiring: the Priest and the Prophet of the Most High; the true Prometheus, who stealing the secret of Heaven, animates man's dust with the spark of God."
- A. Bronson Alcott
On creation, included on a list of "Orphic Sayings" published in the Providence Plain Speaker in May 1841
Sources Consulted and Further Reading
Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House. “The Concord School of Philosophy at Orchard House.” Accessed January 19, 2023. https://louisamayalcott.org/the-school-of-philosophy.
Myerson, Joel. “Additions to Bronson Alcott’s Bibliography: Letters and ‘Orphic Sayings’ in the Plain Speaker.” New England Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1976): 283-92. https://doi.org/10.2307/364503.
