For years — decades, really — my family and I had seen the sign near Harvard as we drove east into Boston on Route 2: “Fruitlands Museum” it reads.
After a while, we began to wonder about it. Because Harvard is near the middle of the state, where we’d also seen signs for apple orchards, we thought it might be a museum to celebrate the state’s apple industry. Finally on one trip, a little bored by the familiar ride and smart phone in hand, I looked it up.
Fruitlands is the name of a transcendental utopian community founded on 90 acres in Harvard in 1843 by Amos Bronson Alcott, father of his perhaps more famous daughter, Louisa May Alcott, author of “Little Women” and its sequels, “Little Men” and “Jo’s Boys.”
The Fruitland Museum and grounds, now a Trustees of the Reservation property, contains the original house that Alcott and the others moved into upon their arrival, as well as a small Shaker house moved to the site from the first Shaker settlement in America, an American Indian museum and an art museum that houses both historic and contemporary exhibits.
And on one point my family was at least partly right: Alcott and his fellow utopians named their experiment “Fruitlands” because of the apple trees already on the property, which they hoped to increase with more plantings over the years.
Louisa May Alcott was 10 years old when her father and his friend, Charles Lane, spearheaded the move from the more populated Concord to launch their utopian experiment. Alcott and Lane, a British businessman Alcott had met on a trip to England, were contemporaries and friends of other well-known transcendentalist thinkers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Transcendentalists believed that people and nature were inherently good and that society, religion and politics corrupted the purity of the individual. Thus, Alcott and Lane strove to remove their community from existing society and start a new one based on ideals, both lofty and utilitarian. They planned to raise their own food to meet the needs of their vegan diet, relying only on hand labor in order not to oppress animals.
They would wear simple garments made of linen, rather than wool, and hoped to devise shoes from bark or some durable fabric to replace the leather ones they’d arrived in. Though Lane, apparently ever eager for the most extreme measure, thought that those who were truly committed could eschew shoes altogether and go barefoot.
In addition to their manual labors, the utopians would set aside time each day for the nourishment and enhancement of their minds, the work it turned out most were best schooled at and suited for.
In her fictionalized account, “Transcendental Wild Oats,” first published in 1873, Louise May Alcott regards the activities of the would-be utopians with wry humor. Of their arrival at the property after their journey by horse-drawn wagon from Concord, Alcott writes, “This prospective Eden at present consisted of an old red farm-house, a dilapidated barn, many acres of meadow-land and a grove. Ten ancient apple trees were all the ‘chaste supply,’ which the place offered as yet; but, in the firm belief that plenteous orchards were soon to be evoked from their inner consciousness, these sanguine founders had christened their domain Fruitlands.”
The experiment lasted only seven months. As with many utopian endeavors, Fruitland’s failure seemed finally due to an abundance of idealism and a scarcity of practicality. Though one of the stated goals was shared labor, Alcott’s mother Abigail ended up doing most of the work. Alcott writes of the one man in the community who consistently helped “Sister Hope,” an alias for her mother, with her “heavy washes, kneaded the endless succession of batches of bread, watched over the children, and did the many tasks left undone by the brethren, who were so busy discussing and defining great duties that they forgot to perform the small ones.”
At another point, Alcott writes of the scanty crop of grain that Fruitland’s members, despite their poor farming skills, had managed to tease from the ground.
“About the time the grain was ready to house, some call of the Oversoul (a reference to the famous essay by Emerson of the same name) wafted all the men away. An easterly storm was coming up and the yellow stacks were sure to be ruined.”
Seeing no other option, Alcott’s mother harvested all of the grain with the help of only her three daughters and one little boy.
Though it was interesting to go through the Fruitlands house with its period artifacts, bookcases of leather-bound books and an attic bedroom where Louisa and her sisters slept, I found the art museum most interesting. Maybe it’s just my bent, but it struck me that here, rather than in the recreated kitchens and bedrooms, you could fathom the mind of the place, and mind was a lot of what the endeavor was about. Two exhibits invited contemporary artists to interact with the literary themes and concerns of the earlier era, creating a fascinating conversation across time.
“Literary Spirit of Fruitlands Museum and The Old Manse,” on view until Nov. 5, presents historic artifacts from the two sites — The Old Manse is the Concord house in which Ralph Waldo Emerson grew up — along with art by contemporary artists Jonathan Gitelson and Lisa McCarty.
McCarty’s photographs, taken at specific places in Concord and Harvard that are mentioned in transcendentalist writings, and accompanied by those passages, incorporate the accidental blur of long exposures or intentional camera movements. The effect is sometimes ghostly, often gorgeous, and seems to capture the intellectual intensity that had occurred in each place — as if past thoughts lived on in each house.
Another exhibit, “Literary Soil,” up through Aug. 20, featured work by interdisciplinary artist Greg Lookerse, who, crazy as it sounds, altered pages of “Moby Dick,” as well as a book of transcendental essays, either by meticulously folding them into ridged honeycomb and floral shapes, creating symmetrical mandalas, or by covering them with salt. The salt-encrusted pages of “Moby Dick” were surprisingly moving; the crystalline sprawl of rime across the pages expressing both the temporality of objects — those pages would surely erode over time — and the longevity of literature.
Permanent collections of the museum include Hudson River School landscapes collected by Clara Endicott Sears, who purchased the Fruitlands site in 1910 and converted the grounds into a museum in 1914. Sears also collected 19th century portraits, which line the main hallway of the museum, their subjects offering their often deadpan faces to the viewer as if grimly aware they are staring at you from another century.
The Native American museum, too, is worth a long look. Sears was aided in amassing her collection of Native American costume and artifacts by staff at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. It’s not a large collection, but it seemed unusually strong; almost every item an exemplary specimen of its kind.
The Fruitlands grounds slope down from a crest where you’ll find the main administrative buildings, a gift shop and restaurant, the art and Native American museums. Resist the impulse to go into the art museum first and walk all the way down to the original Fruitlands house. Then work your way back up, stopping at the Shaker and the other two museums.
When we went in mid-July, many historic or art-making activities were set up for kids along the route. And there are stops scattered throughout the grounds, where you can meet a motorized vehicle if you or your kids get tired.
The Fruitlands site has grown from the original 90 acres to 210, and there are over two miles of trails in five loops that take you through woods, pine barrens, wetlands and meadows. We hadn’t allowed enough time for hiking, but all of the loops seem worth going back to explore. According to the website, one trail leads you to the ruins of The Pergolas, the mansion built by Sears, where you can see, “Traces of the grand gardens and carved stone fountainheads” in the old meadow. Another winds through a 12-acre habitat for ground nesting birds, passes along a glacial beach, as well as the ruins of an old brick factory. And these are just two of five. We might go back and just do the trails.
Find Fruitland Museums at 102 Prospect Hill Road, Harvard. For more information on hours and current exhibits visit: thetrustees.org/fruitlands or call 978-456-3924. For a peek at the trail map, go to: bit.ly/2vG3pvF
Editor’s Note: Quotations from “Transcendental Wild Oats” by Louisa May Alcott appear with permission from Applewood Books, Carlisle, MA, 01741; www.awb.com.