AMHERST, Mass. — For years, the house where Emily Dickinson lived was used as faculty housing by Amherst College. Fans of the famed reclusive poet, however, were so intent on making a literary pilgrimage to the place where she shut herself off from the world that they kept leaning on the doorbell and tramping over the lawn.
So, the college bowed to the inevitable, and the Emily Dickinson Museum was born. The site includes both the Dickinson Homestead — a brick house with white columns where the poet lived — and an adjacent home, the Evergreens, which was built for her brother, Austin, and his wife when they married in 1856. This year marks the first season that the museum is offering joint tours.
Legend has it that after Emily Dickinson reached her 30s, she rarely left the homestead except to go next door to visit her brother and his wife.
The house, which sits inconspicuously off Main Street, was built by Dickinson’s grandfather, a founder of Amherst College, in 1813.
This summer, the college plans to repaint it mustard yellow like it was in the poet’s day.
Visitors can climb a curving staircase to the small, plain bedroom in the west corner where the woman in the white dress wrote the poems she called “my letter to the world that never wrote to me.”
It was not until after Dickinson died at age 55, on May 15, 1886, that her sister, Lavinia, found the handwritten poems, loosely tied together with thread and tucked into a bureau drawer. The bedroom window, draped with white gauze curtains, looks over the rooftops of Amherst to the mountains beyond. In summer, local historians and Dickinson fans tend to the perennial garden she loved.
Next door, the Evergreens, which remained in the Dickinson family until the 1980s, is a time warp of 19th-century family treasures and furniture.
“Everything is just as the Dickinsons left it,” says museum Director Cindy Dickinson, who is no relation to the poet. “The pictures are hung where they placed them. The wallpaper is the same.
“Together the two houses give a better understanding of her world,” she says. “They open it up. There was a lot of going back and forth between the two homes. Emily sent poems to her sister-in-law. And she loved the children.”
The poet was particularly close to her youngest nephew, Gilbert, who died at age 8, the curator says. Among the new areas opened to visitors this spring, she says, is the nursery, left virtually unchanged by the family since Gilbert’s death more than a century ago.
Each May, on the Saturday closest to the anniversary of the poet’s death, Dickinson scholars and fans pays tribute to Amherst’s most famous daughter with an informal walk through town to her grave. First they gather outside the home, each holding a flower. Then they walk to some of her favorite places in Amherst, pausing here and there to read her poetry.
At her grave in the West Cemetery on Triangle Street, they toast her life and art with elderberry wine and recite their favorite poems.
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The Dickinson Museum includes the Dickinson Homestead, where reclusive poet Emily Dickinson was born and lived, and the Evergreens, a home built for her brother and his wife. Together, the museums offer a glimpse into the poet’s life.
The historic homes at 280 Main St. in Amherst are owned by Amherst College.
The homes are open from 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday in April, May, September and October; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday from June to August; and from 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday from November to mid-December. Exceptions are July 4 (closed), Oct. 10 (open) and Nov. 24 (closed).
Gather at 1 p.m. on May 15 for a poetry walk to various places around town, ending at Dickinson’s grave site. Poetry will be read aloud along the way.
Museum admission is $8 for adults, $7 for senior citizens and college students and $5 for high school students and children ages 6 to 12.
For more information, call 413/542-8161 or visit the Web site, www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org.
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