John Adams

Peacefield, Quincy, Massachusetts

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Peacefield, the former home of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, at 135 Adams Street in Quincy, on October 10, 1929. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leon Abdalian Collection.

The house in 2019:

As explained in more detail in an earlier post, this house was the home of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and several more generations of the Adams family from the late 18th century into the early 20th century. The house was built in 1731, and it was originally owned by Leonard Vassall, a sugar plantation owner from Jamaica. His daughter Anna later inherited the property, but she and her husband were Loyalists, so they fled to England at the start of the Revolution, leaving the house vacant.

This text is plagiarized from Lost New England

John and Abigail Adams purchased the house from the family in 1787. At the time, the house was much smaller, consisting of the portion on the left side in these photos. It was also in poor condition, from having sat vacant for so long. They had bought it sight-unseen, as they were living in England at the time, where John was serving as the first U.S. Minister to Great Britain. They were disappointed by the condition of the house when they returned here to live, but they soon set about repairing and expanding it. This work included a large addition on the right side, which was built in the 1790s. Abagail oversaw much of this work, since John Adams was away most of the time during the 1790s, serving as the first vice president and then as the second president of the United States.

John Adams retired from politics after losing reelection to Thomas Jefferson in 1800. He spent the last few decades of his life here at this house, which he named Peacefield. Abigail died in 1818, and John died here on July 4, 1826. In one of the most remarkable coincidences in American history, he died on the same day as his friend and political rival Jefferson, which also happened to be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

John Quincy Adams then inherited the house. At the time of his father’s death he was serving as president, and after losing re-election in 1828 he returned here to Quincy. However, unlike his father, he did not have a quiet retirement. Instead, he returned to politics and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1831 until his death in 1848. During that time, he was particularly vocal in his opposition to slavery, and became one of the leading abolitionists of his era.

During the second half of the 19th century, Peacefield was owned by several more generations of the Adams family. John Quincy Adams’s son, Charles Francis Adams, owned it until his death in 1886, and Charles’s sons Henry and Brooks subsequently inherited it. Brooks ended up being the last member of the family to live here at Peacefield, and he remained here until his death in 1927.

The top photo was taken only two years later, in 1929. By this point, the other members of the Adams family had formed the Adams Memorial Society, and this house was preserved as a museum. The property was later transferred to the National Park Service in 1946, becoming the Adams National Historic Site.

Today, the exterior of the house has seen very few changes since the top photo was taken almost a century ago. The house is still operated by the National Park Service, and it is open to the public seasonally for tours. The name of the Park Service unit is now the Adams National Historical Park, and it includes Peacefield along with the nearby birthplaces of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, which stand side-by-side on Franklin Street in Quincy.

Peacefield, Quincy, Mass

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Peacefield, the former home of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, at 135 Adams Street in Quincy, around 1900-1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The house in 2019:

As discussed in the previous post, John Adams was born in a house that still stands a little more than a mile south of here on Franklin Street in Quincy. Then, as an adult, he and his wife Abigail lived in a house next door to his birthplace, where their son John Quincy Adams was born in 1767. Tat modest saltbox-style farmhouse was their home throughout John Adams’s early political career and the American Revolution, although he was frequently away on government business, including spending most of the Revolution overseas as a diplomat.

After the end of the war, Abigail Adams traveled to Europe with Nabby, arriving in 1784 and reuniting with her husband and John Quincy. The family then spent the next four years in Europe, first in Paris and then in London. During this time, they grew accustomed to living in large, fashionable houses in these cities, so in 1787 they decided to upgrade their living situation back home by purchasing this house, including 80 acres of farmland, on modern-day Adams Street. They were still living in Europe at the time, but they moved into the house upon their return to America a year later.

The house itself dated back to 1731, when the original portion of the building was constructed as the home of Leonard Vassall, a sugar plantation owner from Jamaica. He had died in 1737, but his daughter Anna Borland subsequently inherited the property, and she and her husband John used it as a summer residence. However, she was a loyalist, so she fled to England at the start of the war, and the house was empty for most of the Revolution. She later recovered the property, and her son Leonard ultimately sold it to Adams in 1787 for 600 pounds.

The Adamses had apparently recalled the house as having been one of the finest residences in the town, but they were somewhat disappointed after having purchased it sight unseen from overseas. Although its Georgian architecture was an improvement from their old saltbox house, it was still small, consisting of just six rooms in what is now the left side of the front facade of the house. It was also in poor condition after having been vacant for so long, and it required significant work.

Less than a month after their return to America, Abigail wrote a letter to her daughter Nabby, in which she described the rather dismal condition of the house:

But we have come into a house not half repaired, and I own myself most sadly disappointed. In height and breadth, it feels like a wren’s house. Ever since I came, we have had such a swarm of carpenters, masons, farmers, as have almost distracted me—every thing all at once, with miserable assistance. In short, I have been ready to wish I had left all my furniture behind. The length of the voyage and heat of the ship greatly injured it; some we cannot get up, and the shocking state of the house has obliged me to open it in the garret.

Over time, though, the house, which John Adams named Peacefield, became a suitable residence for the family. It was steadily expanded, including a large addition on the right side of the house, and Abigail oversaw much of this work herself, as John Adams spent most of the 1790s in Philadelphia. There, he served as the first vice president from 1789 to 1797, and then as the second president, succeeding George Washington after the strongly-contested 1796 election between himself and political rival Thomas Jefferson.

During his presidency, the United States capital city shifted from Philadelphia to Washington, D. C. As a result, Adams became the first president to live in the White House, moving in on November 1, 1800. However, his say there was short; that fall, he lost the election to Thomas Jefferson, and he left Washington early on the morning of March 4, 1801 bound for Quincy, just hours before his successor was inaugurated.

Adams largely retired from public life once he returned to Quincy, focusing instead on farming his land here at Peacefield. He avoided making public statements in opposition to Jefferson, and the two men ultimately renewed their friendship and began a frequent exchange of letters after the end of Jefferson’s presidency. However, this period was also a time of personal troubles for Adams. His son Charles had died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1800 at the age of 30, and his son Thomas had similar problems with alcoholism. Then, his daughter Nabby died of breast cancer in 1813, and his wife Abigail died of typhoid fever in 1818.

This left John Quincy Adams as his only surviving child. His son technically owned Peacefield, having purchased it from John Adams when his father had financial troubles in 1803. At the time, John Quincy Adams was a U. S. senator from Massachusetts, and he subsequently became Secretary of State under James Monroe, serving from 1817 to 1825. John Adams lived long enough to see his son elected president in 1824, but he ultimately died halfway through John Quincy Adams’s term, on July 4, 1826, at the age of 90. In one of the most unusual coincidences in American history, Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, which also happened to be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams proved to be a one-term president after losing the election of 1828. He then returned to Peacefield here in Quincy, but his life in politics was hardly over by this point. Despite a relatively average presidency, he went on to have one of the most successful careers of any former president, serving in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1831 until his death in 1848. During this time, he was one of the leading opponents of slavery in Congress, and in his final years one of his colleagues in the House was a young Abraham Lincoln, who served as a pallbearer at Adams’s funeral.

In another more unfortunate parallel between himself and his father, John Quincy Adams also had three sons, two of whom lived troubled lives, struggled with alcoholism, and died young. His oldest son, George Washington Adams, died in 1829 at the age of 28 from an apparent suicide, and his second son, John Adams II, died five years later. Only his youngest son, Charles Francis Adams Sr., outlived him, and he inherited Peacefield after John Quincy Adams’s death.

Charles Francis Adams had a successful career in politics, serving in the state legislature before being elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1858. He was re-elected in 1860, but soon resigned after Abraham Lincoln appointed him as ambassador to the United Kingdom, a diplomatic post that both his father and grandfather had once held. In this capacity, Adams played an important role in keeping the United Kingdom neutral during the Civil War, preventing them from giving aid or diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy.

During his time at Peacefield, Adams continued to make improvements, including the construction of the Stone Library adjacent to the main house. This building, which stands just out of view on the far left side of this scene, was built in accordance with John Quincy Adams’s wishes and completed in 1873. Designed to be fireproof, the building houses over 12,000 collected by several generations of the Adams family, along with other important family papers and documents.

Charles Francis Adams died in 1886, and his sons Henry and Brooks were the fourth and last generation to live here at Peacefield. Both were alive when the first photo was taken, and it was around this time that Henry completed his famous memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, although it would not be published until after his death in 1918. In the meantime, Brooks continued to live here until his death in 1927, 140 years after his great grandfather had purchased the property.

During his ownership, Brooks Adams had steadily sold off most of the property, and by the time he died Peacefield consisted of just four acres surrounding the house. He had no children to inherit the house, so the other Adams family descendants formed the Adams Memorial Society, and opened the house to the public as a museum. This organization ran it for nearly 20 years, before ultimately transferring it to the National Park Service in 1946.

Originally named the Adams Mansion National Historic Site, it was later renamed the Adams National Historical Park, and it now includes the nearby birthplaces of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Throughout this time, Peacefield has remained well-preserved, and today this exterior view looks nearly identical to its appearance more than a century ago, aside from the brick portion of the fence on the right side. Along with both birthplace houses, Peacefield is still open to the public, with guided tours of the main house and the Stone Library.

John Adams and John Quincy Adams Birthplaces, Quincy, Mass

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The John Adams (right) and John Quincy Adams (left) birthplaces on Franklin Street in Quincy, around 1904. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2019:

As of 2020, only seven states have been the birthplace of two or more presidents. Massachusetts is among them, with four presidents, and two of these were born here, in this half-acre triangle of land between Franklin Street and Presidents Avenue. John Adams was born in 1735, in the house on the right side of this scene, and his son John Quincy Adams was born 32 years later, in the house on the left in the foreground. Standing only 75 feet apart, these are the two closest presidential birthplaces in the country, and they are also the two oldest surviving ones; no other presidents before William Henry Harrison were born in buildings that still exist.

The house on the right, where John Adams was later born, was built in 1722 by the future president’s father, Deacon John Adams. At the the time, this area was part of the town of Braintree, as the present-day city of Quincy would not be incorporated as a separate municipality until 1792. Deacon Adams had purchased the property, which included seven acres of farmland, in 1720, and he subsequently built the house, apparently reusing timbers from an earlier house that had stood here. Adams married his wife Susanna Boylston in 1734, and a year later their first son John was born here. John spent his childhood here, along with his younger brothers Peter and Elihu, although he left home in 1751 at the age of 16, in order to attend Harvard.

In sending his son to Harvard, Deacon Adams had hoped that John would become a minister, but after graduation he moved to Worcester, where he worked as a schoolteacher before deciding to study law. John ultimately returned here to his family home in 1758, and a year later he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law. Two years later, Deacon Adams died at the age of 70, and his son Peter inherited the old family home, with John receiving the house next door on the left side of the scene, which Deacon Adams had acquired in 1744.

John Adams married Abigail Smith in 1764, and the couple moved into the house here on the left side. Although John’s father had only owned it for 20 years at that point, it was actually even older than the other house. It was definitely built by 1717, but it apparently incorporated parts of an earlier house that had been built here on this site in 1663. In either case, the house was expanded at some point after it was built, possibly during Deacon Adams’s ownership, and in its current form it is architecturally very similar to the house on the right. Both are good examples of the traditional New England saltbox style, with three window bays on the front facade, a central chimney, two front rooms on both the first and second floors, and two additional rooms on the first floor of the lean-to.

Upon moving into the house on the left, John Adams converted the southeast room on the ground floor—at the corner closest to the foreground in this scene—into his law office. From the exterior, the only change was the door here at the corner, which allowed clients to come and go without using the main entrance. On the other side of the house, in the northeast corner, was the parlor, and the kitchen was located behind it in the lean-to section. There were two bedrooms upstairs, and future president John Quincy Adams was born in the northern bedroom, on the right side in this scene.

Aside from John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), John and Abigail Adams had five other children: Abigail “Nabby” (1765-1813), Susanna (1768-1770), Charles (1770-1800), Thomas (1772-1832), and Elizabeth (stillborn in 1777). This was their home throughout this time, although John was frequently away from here during and after the American Revolution. From 1774 to 1777, he was a delegate at the First and Second Continental Congresses in Philadelphia, and then from 1777 to 1779 he was overseas as an envoy in France. This was followed by an even longer stay in Europe during the 1780s, when he served as Minister to the Netherlands and Minister to Great Britain.

During John Adams’s long periods away from home, he and Abigail exchanged hundreds of letters, a substantial number of which have survived. Although she lacked formal education, the letters reveal Abigail’s role as an influential advisor and confidant to her husband, and these letters have become a part of the American literary canon. Abigail wrote many of the letters from here at their house, including her famous 1776 exhortation to John to “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors” when creating a new government.

As it turned out, a few years later John Adams would almost singlehandedly create the Massachusetts state government here in his law office in this house. In 1779, during his brief return to America between diplomatic assignments, he found himself on the three-man drafting committee at the state constitutional convention. Like any group project, the other two members of the committee, in turn, assigned him the actual task of writing the text of the new constitution, much of which was done here.

This document was ratified a year later in 1780, and it remains in effect today, making it the world’s oldest written constitution. Its structure also served as a model for the United States Constitution, which was written seven years later. However, perhaps Adams’s single most famous contribution to the constitution was the seemingly-innocuous statement that “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” Although largely echoing Thomas Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence, the “born free and equal” phrase became the legal basis for the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1781, when the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that slavery was incompatible with the words of the constitution.

John Adams returned to Europe in late 1779, shortly after he finished drafting the constitution. He and Abigail would be separated for the next five years, until she and Nabby joined him and John Quincy in Paris in 1784. They would remain overseas until 1788, and during this time they grew accustomed to the more lavish residences that they enjoyed in Europe, in contrast to their decidedly modest farmhouse back home. As a result, in 1787, while he was still in Europe, he purchased a mansion a little over a mile north of here, which was situated on 40 acres of land. Upon returning home a year later, he named it Peacefield, and set about expanding and renovating it.

John and Abigail would live at Peacefield for the rest of their lives, and the home would remain in the Adams family for several more generations. During this time, though, the family also retained these houses here on Franklin Street. These were generally used as rental properties throughout most of the 19th century, although John Quincy Adams did live here in his birthplace and childhood home from 1805 to 1807, during part of his single term as a United States senator.

By the late 19th century, both of these houses were occupied by local historical groups, with the Quincy Historical Society in the John Quincy Adams birthplace on the left, and the Adams Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in the John Adams birthplace on the right. Around this same time the houses were also restored to their 18th century appearances, including uncovering the side door to John Adams’s law office, which had long been boarded over. The first photo was taken soon after, probably around 1904, with the colonial-era homes contrasting with the modern trolley tracks and overhead wires In the foreground.

The Adams family ultimately owned these properties for more than two centuries, until selling them to the city of Quincy in 1940. Both houses were designated as National Historic Landmarks in 1960, and in 1978 the city transferred them to the National Park Service. Today, remarkably little has changed in this scene since the first photo was taken, and both houses remain well-preserved. Along with the nearby Peacefield mansion, they now form the Adams National Historical Park, and they are open to the public for guided tours.

John Adams Birthplace, Quincy, Mass

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The John Adams birthplace at 133 Franklin Street in Quincy, around 1904. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The house in 2019:

This house was built in 1722, although its structure incorporated timbers from an earlier 17th century house that may have stood on this same site. As such, it is one of the oldest surviving houses in Quincy, predating even the establishment of the town by 70 years. However, the house is best known as the birthplace and childhood home of President John Adams, who was born here on October 30, 1735.

The president’s father, Deacon John Adams, purchased this property in 1720, which consisted of seven acres of farmland in what was, at the time, part of the town of Braintree. He built the current house about two years later, although it would be another 12 years before he married his wife Susanna Boylston in 1734, when he was 43 and she was 26. Their son John Adams was born a year later, in the east bedroom on the second floor, at the corner of the house closest to the foreground in this scene. They went on to have two more sons, Peter and Elihu, and Deacon John lived here until his death in 1761 at the age of 70.

In the meantime, the future president and founding father spent his childhood here in this house, before leaving for Harvard in 1751 when he was 16. After graduation, Adams spent time in Worcester, where he studied law and worked as a teacher for a few years before returning to his hometown. After their father’s death, his brother Peter inherited this house, with John receiving the house next door, which his father had acquired in 1744. John apparently continued to live here in this house, though, until his marriage to Abigail Smith in 1764.

John and Abigail Adams then moved into the neighboring house, and three years later their son, John Quincy Adams, was born in that house in 1767. As a result, these two houses are the closest presidential birthplaces in the country, standing only 75 feet apart. John Adams eventually purchased his birthplace house from his brother in 1774, and rented it to other tenants. He and Abigail continued to live in the other house until 1788, although he spent much of this time away from home, including spending much of the American Revolution as a diplomat in Europe.

Upon returning from Europe in 1788, the Adamses moved to a much larger house elsewhere in town, which they named Peacefield. However, John continued to own both of these houses until 1803, when he sold them to John Quincy Adams. The properties would subsequently be owned by several more generations, and for much of the 19th century they were used as rental properties.

Both houses remained in the Adams family for many years, although by the turn of the 20th century they had become museums, with the Quincy Historical Society occupying the John Quincy Adams birthplace, and the Adams Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution here in the John Adams birthplace. The first photo was taken during this time, as indicated by the DAR sign on the side of the house.

The family finally sold both houses to the city of Quincy in 1940. In 1960, they were designated as National Historic Landmarks, and in 1978 they were transferred to the National Park Service. Along with the Peacefield mansion, the houses are now part of the Adams National Historical Park, and they are open to the public for guided tours.