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Fruitlands Museum, Harvard MA
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Fruitlands Museum,
founded in 1914 by Clara
Endicott Sears, takes its name from an experiment led by Bronson
Alcott and Charles Lane, which took place here in 1843.
The complex includes:
The Fruitlands
Farmhouse, the site of an experiment led by Alcott and Lane in 1843
• The
Shaker Office Building, which houses the largest archive of Harvard Shaker
documents in the world
• The Native American Gallery, which houses a
significant collection of artifacts that honors the spiritual presence and
cultural history of the first Americans
• The Art Gallery, containing 100
Hudson River School landscape paintings, and significantly, over 230 nineteenth
century vernacular portraits, the second largest collection in the country.
THE SEARS SUMMER ESTATE
Sears maintained a
summer estate and “gentleman’s farm” here along with the museum complex from
1914 until her death in 1960. During her lifetime, Miss Sears published several
books, wrote popular songs for WW1, and ran a cannery and food drying charity,
which sent 2 tons of food to the troops in the trenches of France. In 1930, the
Fruitlands Museum, which continues her work in historic preservation, was
incorporated.
ANCIENT GLACIAL LANDSCAPE
The property has a rich
history and has been host to some of the most famous people in history. Thoreau
walked Prospect Hill and admired its view. Emerson visited Alcott here, and
Louisa May (then 10), would relate her experiences here in Little Women.
When Miss Sears looked
out over the landscape at Fruitlands decades after Thoreau, she imagined the
Nashua River valley and recalled the past people who contemplated that same
vista in the past. Sears believed that our common experiences link us together
across time.
