Over the years, The Trustees has protected the homes and legacies of many significant women in the arts and sciences. From museum founders to mathematicians, painters, and musicians, here are six individuals whose influence on American culture is now permanently conserved by The Trustees for generations to come.

Clara Endicott Sears and Louisa May Alcott

Fruitlands Museum, Harvard

Fruitlands Museum hosts the stories of many extraordinary women, including museum founder Clara Endicott Sears (1863- 1960) and former resident Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). Sears was a prolific author and dedicated community advocate. Her love of American history and the Nashua River Valley inspired her life’s work as a collector and preservationist. At age 50, Sears realized the historical significance of the farmhouse at the foot of her property.

The Fruitlands Farmhouse—a National Historic Landmark built in 1826—takes its name from the transcendentalist experiment that took place here in 1843. Led by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane, they called this place Fruitlands because they intended to live off the “fruits of the land.” Alcott brought his wife and four young daughters, including a 10-year-old Louisa May.

While the experiment was short-lived, its role in the transcendentalist movement and influence on a young Louisa May Alcott are undeniable. Many visitors may also recognize the Farmhouse attic as the inspiration of those now iconic scenes from her famous book Little Women.

Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley

The Old Manse, Concord

Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (1793-1867) and her husband Samuel, a minister, came to live in the Ripley family home—The Old Manse—in 1846. Less than two years later, Samuel died suddenly, leaving Sarah a widow. By all accounts she was an extraordinary woman for her time.

Self-taught, Ripley was fluent in many languages and was a scholar and tutor of classics, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, and botany. Her wide-ranging knowledge brought her many admirers among the Concord intellectuals. For example, she and the young Henry David Thoreau shared a mutual love of nature, and Ripley would often collect botanical specimens from nearby fields to share with him.

Miss Amelia Peabody

Powisset Farm and Noanet Woodlands, Dover

In 1923, a young Boston heiress named Amelia Peabody (1890-1984) began to acquire land in Dover, including what is now Powisset Farm and Noanet Woodlands. She came to the area because of the Norfolk Hunt Club, but her life there wasn’t all parties and horses (though she loved both). At Powisset, she raised heritage breed Hereford cattle and Yorkshire pigs, invested in innovative architecture, filled the woods with native wildflowers, and created public riding and walking paths throughout her property.

A passionate artist, Peabody studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as in Paris and New York. Her sculpture was exhibited at the New York World’s Fair, the Whitney Museum, and the Boston Athenaeum. Amelia’s philanthropy reached far and wide and continues today through a charitable foundation established in her name. When she died in 1984, Miss Peabody willed over 700 acres to The Trustees, thus establishing two of the organization’s most beloved reservations.

Polly Thayer Starr

Weir River Farm, Hingham

Ethel Randolph (“Polly”) Thayer Starr (1904- 2006) was drawn to art from an early age. Raised in a family of prominent Boston legal scholars, it was at Weir River Farm—her family’s summer estate in Hingham—that Starr’s captivation with the offerings of nature-inspired fervid explorations into drawing and painting.

Starr was trained in portraiture at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and quickly achieved notoriety, being awarded the prestigious First Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy of Design in her mid-20s. Yet the infinite variety of nature would captivate her for the rest of her long life. She was a prolific painter of landscapes and animals but also focused on the intricacies of insects and flowers, especially as her eyesight began to fail in her later years.

Miné Sawahara Crane

The Crane Estate, Ipswich & Essex

A native of Hiroshima, Miné Sawahara Crane (1917-1991) married Cornelius Crane—heir to The Crane Estate—in 1955 in a Shinto ceremony in Japan and became a U.S. citizen in 1960. She was a prolific artist, musician (a flutist and harpist), and patron of the arts, establishing the Mrs. Cornelius Crane Scholarship at the Julliard School.

Miné and Cornelius lived part-time at Castle Hill in the cottage (now the Inn at Castle Hill). She used one of the towers in the nearby garden as her art studio, which afforded sweeping views over the salt marshes. She was inspired by these natural surroundings; however, her stylized landscapes and other subjects are more imaginary than realistic.

Crane’s paintings were exhibited in New York and Paris in the 1970s and 80s. Her favorite place perhaps was Choate Island, where the couple could live in complete privacy in a small cottage with views of Ipswich Bay, surrounded by grazing sheep. In 1974 she donated her own Ipswich estate (separate from Castle Hill) to The Trustees, now part of the Crane Wildlife Refuge. Following her death in 1991, she was buried alongside Cornelius on Choate Island.