TRIP #5, 2014--The Adams Family

The Adams Family--History Style
"You can make the next tour, but the trolley will leave in two minutes," said the ranger at the main office of the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts. "I recommend you use the facilities before you board the trolley since you will be gone for two hours."
"Great," I told Andy. "They are both occupied."
Luckily a couple from Canada came into the park office just after us.  We didn't hold up the green street trolley, but it left a few minutes late anyway.

The house where John Adams, second U.S. President,
was born on Franklin Street remains on its original footings
at the foot of Penn's Hill.

We had arrived just in time to hop on the trolley for the 10:15 a.m. tour for a minimal fee of $5 a person, free if one carried a Golden Age Pass as we did.   Eight of the ten others on the trolley were probably senior citizens, as well.
Ranger Brian related some history as the trolley rolled down Franklin Street to the birthplaces of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, both Presidents of the United States. "Franklin Street was a direct road to Boston in those days," said Ranger Brian. "Actually, it was the only through-road to the city. It runs right past the two houses, so these families lived at a very busy corner. They had constant contact with the outside world and easy access to the big city, even though they were living on farms."
Quincy, Massachusetts is an old town.  A huge rock marking the entrance to Freedom Park, a Quincy city park, read, "1776-1976" as we passed in the trolley.
Ranger Brian explained that the family owned 180 acres behind the house, some of it originally purchased by John Quincy, Senior, a deacon in the church and important town official when there was no separation of church and state.  He called him Deacon John from that point on.
He had us walk in a circle through the four downstairs rooms.  Then he answered questions about the fireplaces and the old rotisserie.  "Turning the rotisserie was a child's job," he said. "Maybe a child five to eight-years-old.  The mother would use an hour glass. When the sand ran down, it was time for the child to turn the knob one notch and start the sand glass again."
The house was sparsely furnished.  Ranger Brian said, "Deacon John was exceedingly thrifty.  He had almost no furniture."  The thrift went way beyond being a farmer who didn't need luxuries.  In the winter Deacon John worked as a cobbler.  One downstairs room was his shoe shop.
The house is on its original footprint, but most of the walls and all of the furniture are replaced period pieces that match descriptions of the times and writings by family members.  Deacon John's second child and first son, John Adams (1735), was born in the upstairs parents' bedroom of this house, as were all of his children.

Next door and only 75 feet away on its original footings is the
home where sixth U.S. President John Quincy Adams was born.

Another room downstairs was used by John Adams as a law office after he attended Harvard College and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar.  But Deacon John had had to demand his son get a formal education or he would have stayed in Quincy and farmed like his father.
The second house, only 75 feet away, was actually 20 years older but purchased later by Deacon John.  Initially he rented the house to tenant farmers who worked for the family.
When son John Adams married Abigail Smith in 1764, they moved in and John set up another law office. Here, John Quincy Adams was born. Here too John Adams drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, the model for constitutions of many other states.
This house had more furnishings but was still modest and simple.  I asked Ranger Brian about the black bucket by the front door.  "Oh, that's for water," he said. "It's a fire bucket."  All the visitors seemed surprised, so Ranger Brian elaborated.  "The number one cause of death to women in the 1700's was fire. They wore long dresses and cooked and heated at a fireplace."  We all nodded.  "But," he continued, "they didn't die from the fire.  The water put out the skirt fires.  They died from infection.  They had no salve for the burns."
Our final history lesson at the house was about John Adams in particular. Ranger Brian said, "John Adams was the most prolific fund raiser of all the Founding Fathers.  He collected more than 20 million dollars for the Revolution," said Ranger Brian.  "That was in their dollars."
"Do you realize," whispered Andy, "that's over one hundred million today!"
Abigail Adams, a prolific correspondent and loving confident, ran the farm in the absence of her husband.  She was the "patriot on the homefront."  She even melted her pewter spoons to make musket balls for the Continental Army. She used a musket ball mold, so eldest child John Quincy was truly a child of the American Revolution.

Peacefield farm becomes a country home as fields are
converted to flower gardens and hay stacks to orchards.

Then the trolley pulled up.  We heard his bell ding, and it was time to board.  There was barely a moment to snap a photo, and no pictures were allowed inside at all.  But within an hour we had walked through the birthplaces of our nation's second and sixth Presidents.
Then it was on to Peacefield, a "very Genteel Dwelling House" in the words of John Adams' wife Abigail, when they returned in 1788 from working abroad as diplomat and minister plenipotentiary. In 1788, John Adams also described his home. "It is but the farm of a patriot," he said.

Gardens of flowers replace the vegetables that Abigail grew.
To the left is the Stone Library, John Adams' favorite retreat.

The trolley took us a mile and a half--a little more via current roads--to Peacefield.  Here, four generations of Adams family members lived from 1788 to 1927.  John Adams purchased the house and 75 acres when he and Abigail and oldest child Abigail, always called "Nabby" (1765) returned from France, where he had drafted and signed the Treaty of Ghent to end the Revolutionary War, and Great Britain, where he had served four years as Ambassador.  Abigail couldn't imagine living in the tiny "cottage" on Franklin Street after four years in a 32-room mansion abroad.  He wrote, "I think to christen my Place by the Name of Peace Field in commemoration of the Peace which I assisted in making in 1783."  He went on to serve as Vice President under George Washington and second President of the U.S.  His second child and first son,
John Quincy Adams (1767), would become the sixth President of the U.S.
Ranger Elizabeth walked us through the rooms of the Peacefield mansion with 75,000 pieces of original furnishings and mementos.  She pointed out chairs that John and Abigail had purchased second hand in France and then joked about the former President's "tag sale" furniture.  Pointing to two other chairs she said, "Those are Monroe chairs from the White House. When a President leaves office, he takes his own furniture with him if he bought the pieces with his own money, but not if he used public funds.  The Monroe chairs belonged to John and Abigail, but when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was in the White House, she redecorated, like most First Ladies, and tried to buy back those chairs.  The Adams family refused.  Just imagine saying NO to Jackie O!"

Flowers bloomed in brilliant colors
since Massachusetts had not yet had
a first frost of the season.

One of the guests asked about the delicate fireplace screens. Ranger Elizabeth chuckled.  "Those were to protect faces from the heat of the fire but not quite in the way you would think," she explained.  "In those days many people got small pox that left deep pits in the skin on their faces.  They smoothed out their cheeks and foreheads with bees wax.  The wax would melt and run on one side if they sat near the hot fire.  Hence, the screens." We all laughed in amazement.  Ranger Elizabeth continued, "It led to expressions like crack a smile and wax on and off."  We have certainly lost the meanings today, but the origin of these expressions is interesting. Upstairs, a hallway crossed the back of the house.  "President Adams had this added on so he would not have to walk through the guest bedroom to get to his study in the middle of the night," said Ranger Elizabeth.  We tried to imagine him tiptoeing past the Czar of Russia in order to read late at night.
Every new room and every turn brought fascinating revelations of history with not nearly enough time to take it all in.

Ranger Elizabeth bids us goodbye
before we board the trolley back to the
National Park Visitor Center.

Finally, we went into the Stone Library with 12,000 volumes. Adams had this built to protect his books in case of fire.  With granite walls and crushed granite foundation floor, the Stone Library is cool and comfortable, as well, with books from four generations as much as three layers deep from floor to ceiling on every subject imaginable.  Revolution-era leader and second President John Adams had written, "I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.  His sons did study diplomacy , navigation and commerce, and their sons studied history, art and literature.
Three things stood out for us about the Stone Library: 1. On the wall was a portrait to memorialize the signing of the Treaty of Ghent to end the Revolutionary War.  "It's only half finished," said Ranger Elizabeth, "because the British representatives refused to sit for the portrait."  2. On the table was a box with the Amistad Bible, a gift from the captured Africans to John Adams for defending them and winning their freedom in a Supreme Court case.  3. The floor was tile pieces in a patchwork quilt pattern. Ranger Elizabeth asked us to find the "one mistake."  Then she showed us one switched tile piece, done on purpose by every good "quilter," because "only God is perfect."

Blossoms of every shape and size bloom
in the gardens of Peacefield.

John Quincy Adams, the nation's sixth President, changed Peacefield from a working farm to a country estate.  He found great satisfaction and comfort in planting trees and lived by the motto, "he plants for future generations."  Ranger Elizabeth pointed out the Waterford crystal bowl he had used to plant acorns because he could watch the roots.  "Thank goodness his wife Louisa Catherine was a patient and tolerant woman," she joked.  The Waterford bowl on display had been carefully glued back together.

This rock cairn on the heights marks the
spot where Abigail and John Quincy saw
Charlestown burn at British hands.

When the tour ended, we stayed to stroll the grounds and garden.  John Quincy's son Charles Francis Adams transformed his grandmother's kitchen garden into a formal flower garden bounded by the ancient boxwood hedge.  Andy took careful notes.  "This is giving me good ideas for the top of our driveway," he told me.  I turned on the camera and took more pictures.
By 1927, Brooks Adams, son of Charles and the last family member to live in the house, had set the stage for the Adams Memorial Society, made up of direct descendants to manage the property and eventually turn it over to the National Park Service.
We watched the movie when we got back to the Park office.
A quick stop at the Abigail Adams Cairn marked the spot where Abigail and son John Quincy watched Charlestown burn, as the British prepared to storm Bunker Hill in 1775.  With patriot husband away, they feared for their own lives as the British advanced into Charlestown.  It must have been incredibly frightening for seven-year-old John Quincy to run for his life as a child of the Revolution.  Ranger Elizabeth had told us, "He grew up very fast out of necessity."

On the top of Dorchester Heights, trees had
not yet changed and sun warmed the world.

Andy did an incredible job of navigating the Boston traffic, already bumper to bumper at 3:00 p.m., and following the uphill streets to find Dorchester, home of the Irish immigrants to Boston.  The high ground on Dorchester Neck in 1775, had offered General George Washington a chance to close the circle around British occupied Boston.  The high ground involved 1,200 workers and 800 infantry manually working with 360 oxen carts.  To distract the British and make them think that Washington would attack from Back Bay, a bombardment of artillery fire came from Cambridge two days before.

From the Heights, the view of Boston is breathtaking.

General John Thomas's forces moved from Roxbury to occupy the Heights.  On the night of March 4, 1776, patriot forces crossed into Dorchester under cover of darkness and the continued Cambridge artillery fire.  By morning, two small forts dominated the high ground to the south of Boston.  Canons from Fort Ticonderoga, 350 miles away, had been hauled up by oxen carts to Dorchester Heights.

Andy relaxes at the
highest point in Boston.

                      Washington threatened to blow up and sink the British ships in Boston Harbor.  Eleven days later, the American forces secured the last hill on Dorchester Neck, prompting the British to leave Boston on March 17, 1776.
Today a lush, green hilltop overlooks gentrified four-story homes with all of Boston in the distance.  We remembered the run-down neighborhood of 40 years ago with graffiti and broken bottles around the stone memorial.  How beautifully things had changed!  We met a group of college students on tour from Liberty College in Virginia.  "This is an on-line extension school," explained one student, after I offered to snap their group picture.  They too were reading about the history of this special place--one hilltop that determined the future of our country... one hilltop that changed the course of history.