Wayside on the historic "American Mile" roadway toward Lexington, and is less than a half-mile from Bush, the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where Henry David Thoreau and the Alcotts were frequent visitors. The Alcotts in Residence Orchard House was the most permanent home of the Alcotts, with the family in residence from 1858 to 1877. During this period, the family included Bronson, his wife Abigail May, and their daughters Anna, Louisa, and May. Elizabeth, the model for Beth March, had died in March 1858, just weeks before the family moved in. The Alcott girls befriended the Hawthorne children, who lived next door, though Nathaniel Hawthorne himself was elusive. Bronson Alcott was disappointed, and recorded: "Nobody gets a chance to speak with him unless by accident." However, he added, "Still he has a tender kindly side, and a voice that a woman might own, the hesitance is so taking, and the tones so remote from what you expected." The Alcotts were vegetarians, and harvested fruits and vegetables from the gardens and orchard on the property. Conversations about abolitionism, women's suffrage, and social reform were often held around the dining room table. The family performed theatricals using the dining room as their stage while guests watched from the adjoining parlor. The parlor was a formal room with arched niches built by Bronson to display busts of his favorite philosophers, Socrates and Plato. On May 23, 1860, Anna married John Bridge Pratt in this room. The youngest daughter, May, was a talented artist. Her bedroom contains sketches of angelic, mythological, and biblical figures on the woodwork and doors. In Louisa's room, May painted a panel of calla lilies, as well as an owl on the fireplace. Copies of Turner landscapes by May adorn various rooms in Orchard House. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott wrote her beloved classic novel, Little Women, in her room on a special "shelf desk" built by her father. Set within the house, its characters are based on members of her family, with the plot loosely based on the family's earlier years and events that transpired at The Wayside. Also written in the house were Bronson Alcott's Ralph Waldo Emerson (1865; published 1882), Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872), and Table Talk (1877). On the grounds to the west of the house is a structure designed and built by Bronson Alcott originally known as "Hillside Chapel," and later as "The