National Historical Park preserves the home of United States presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams
General Information
How to Get There
Overview
Adams National Historical Park, formerly Adams National Historic Site, in Quincy, Massachusetts, preserves the home of United States presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, of U.S. envoy to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, and of writers and historians Henry Adams and Brooks Adams.
There is an off-site Visitors Center less than a mile (1.6 km) away. Regularly scheduled tours of the houses are offered in season (April 19 to November 10) by guided tour only. Access to United First Parish Church, where the Adamses worshipped and are buried, is provided by the congregation. The Church of the Presidents is across the town square from the Visitors Center and provides tours on a regular basis.
This house is a National Historic Landmark, the birthplace of John Adams. In 1720 it was purchased by Deacon John Adams, Sr., the father of the future second president. The younger Adams lived here until 1764, when he married Abigail Smith. It is a few feet from the John Quincy Adams Birthplace home, where John and Abigail Adams moved.
The house where John and Abigail Adams and their family lived during the time he was working on the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War is also the 1767 birthplace of their son, John Quincy Adams. The younger Adams grew up in the home, and he and his family lived in it for a time later in life.
The Old House was originally constructed in 1731 for Leonard Vassall, a sugar plantation owner, and was used as his summer house. The house stood empty for some time before it, along with 75 acres (30 ha), was purchased by Adams on September 23, 1787, for 600 pounds. The Adams family renamed it Peacefield, moved in the next year, and various generations occupied it until 1927, when Brooks Adams, the last occupant, died. That year it was sold to the Adams Memorial Society.
The National Park Service acquired it in 1947, and it has been a National Historic Site ever since.
The Stone Library, completed in 1870, stands next to Peacefield and houses personal papers and over 14,000 books which belonged to John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams, and Brooks Adams. In his will, John Quincy Adams requested that the library be built out of stone so that it would be fireproof.
The Library holds John Adams' copy of George Washington's Farewell Address as well as the Mendi Bible, a bible presented to John Quincy Adams in 1841 by the freed Mendi captives who had mutinied on the schooner La Amistad and who Adams had successfully defended before the United States Supreme Court.
Henry Adams wrote his nine-volume The History of the United States of America 1801–1817 in the library.
The church where both presidents and first ladies are entombed in the Adams Crypt is in close walking distance to the park visitor center but is not and has never been run by the National Park service. It is owned by the active congregation of Unitarian Universalists. In the past ten years, the congregation has used almost $2 million of its own resources to preserve the building. Church volunteers regularly give tours of the crypt, and the church is a popular second destination among park visitors.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Adams National Historical Park", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
