[citation needed] Shortly after the failure of the Fruitlands experiment, educator and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott and his family moved to Concord.

[3] Neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson helped the family find the property to buy: a home most recently owned by a wheelwright named Horatio Cogswell.

[6] No one seemed to know much about the history of the home, though Henry David Thoreau told the story that one of its previous owners believed he would never die and his ghost was rumored to haunt it.

Abby, however, saw the town as a symbol of their poverty and desired a move to the city of Boston to be closer to friends, relatives, and potential work.

He assured his wife Sophia Peabody that his publishers Ticknor & Fields "promise the most liberal advances of money, should we need it, towards buying the house.

[17] After buying the house, Hawthorne wrote, "Mr Alcott... had wasted a good deal of money in fitting it up to suit his own taste—all of which improvements I get for little or nothing.

[24] By October 1852, Hawthorne wrote to his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "I am beginning to take root here, and feel myself, for the first time in my life, really at home.

"[25] The family moved to England when Nathaniel Hawthorne was appointed United States consul at Liverpool; he served in that role from August 1, 1853, to October 12, 1857.

[26] Shortly before leaving, on June 14, 1853, friend and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow held a farewell dinner party at his Cambridge home.

[27] The Hawthornes stayed in Europe until 1860 and, during that time, they leased The Wayside to family members including Sophia's sister, Mary Peabody, who later married Horace Mann.

During her time in the house, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn stayed at The Wayside for a night while hiding his connection to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.

[31] The site was the former home of a man named John Moore and was surrounded by elms and butternut trees, and included an apple orchard.

"[37] After the family returned to the United States in 1860, Nathaniel considered moving to Boston, noting, "I am really at a loss to imagine how we are to squeeze ourselves into that little old cottage of mine.

"[28] The income from his consulship did not bring as much money as he predicted and, to make matters worse, reception to his latest book, The Marble Faun, was not positive.

Hoping to expand The Wayside rather than move, he wrote of his financial woes "with a wing of a house to build, and my girls to educate, and Julian to send to Cambridge [to study at Harvard College]".

[40] Next-door neighbor Bronson Alcott cut paths and planted gardens for the Hawthornes, which included fir trees and larches imported from England, and Thoreau surveyed the property for $10.

[33] The Hawthornes also added a second story over Alcott's west wing, enclosed the bay porch and moved the barn to the east side of the house.

Nathaniel was not entirely pleased with the result: I have been equally unsuccessful in my architectural projects; and have transformed a simple and small old farm-house into the absurdest anomaly you ever saw; but I really was not so much to blame here as the village-carpenter, who took the matter into his own hands, and produced an unimaginable sort of thing instead of what I asked for.

He returned to the Wayside on April 10, 1862, and less than a month later sent The Atlantic an essay titled "Chiefly About War Matters by a Peaceable Man".

He and publishing partner William Ticknor agreed that comments about President Lincoln's odd features and references to "Uncle Abe" should be omitted.

[46] Nathaniel cut the entire section, though he considered it "the only part of the article really worth publishing" and lamented, "What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!

The Lothrops added town water in 1883, central heating in 1888, and electric lighting in 1904, as well as a large piazza on the west side in 1887.

Speeches were given, letters were read in public, and a tablet was dedicated by Beatrix Hawthorne (daughter of Julian) marking the larch path where the author often walked.

"I have no prospect whatever of being able to be present", she wrote, "I have tried very hard for a couple of years to leave my work among the poor, to go to Concord, or its neighborhood, but have been prevented very imperatively".

[41] This designation came with the aid of the Lothrops' daughter Margaret,[citation needed] and it became the first literary site to be acquired by the National Park Service.