COVER STORY
Presidential timber
Adams National Historical Park, Quincy
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MORE INFORMATION
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The Adams National Historical Park Visitors Center, 1250 Hancock St., is across from the Quincy Center stop on the Red Line. Free validated parking is available at the garage next door. The houses are open daily from April 19 through Nov. 10, 9-to-5 p.m.; tours take at least two hours and the trolleys leave the center every half hour from 9:15 a.m to 3:15 p.m. Admission is $2, under 17 free. Call 617-770-1175 or visit www.nps.gov/adam.
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There is no good excuse why it took me so long to make the pilgrimage to the Adams family house, or rather, houses.
Not only are they a mere 20 minutes away from downtown Boston, but founding father John Adams has been a hero of mine. The vain, thin-skinned but courageous Puritan from Braintree had a lot to do with the British getting the heave-ho back in 1776, and never received his full due.
Adams National Historic Park, operated by the National Park Service, includes three historic houses on two sites that are 1 1/2 miles apart. From the Visitors Center in Quincy Center, trolleys leave for the birthplaces of the country's only father and son presidents, John and John Quincy.
The salt box where John was born in 1735 and the nearby house where John Quincy was born in 1767 are, for security reasons, furnished with reproductions. That doesn't matter; you will feel the Adamses' presence just by stepping inside. John Quincy's birthplace was where his father practiced law and his mother, Abigail, wrote her famous "Remember the Ladies" letter advocating women's rights.
Next stop on the tour is The Old House, bought by the senior John in 1788 and the family home until 1927. John Quincy lived there after leaving the White House, followed by son Charles Francis Adams, who as US envoy to London played a key role in keeping Britain neutral during the Civil War. Grandson Henry Adams, the famed historian and cranky autobiographer, got some of his education there. The last Adams to live there was Brooks, Henry's brother and the family historian.
With its creaky floors and narrow halls, the Old House contains more than 78,000 Adams artifacts (not all on display, for sure), from furniture and family china, to oil portraits and plaster busts. The highlight is the upstairs study; John Adams's spectacles are folded atop the desk where he wrote letters to Thomas Jefferson in Monticello. The wing chair in the corner is where Adams took ill on July 4, 1726, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the declaration and spoke his last words: "Jefferson still survives." (His compatriot, in fact, died before him that day).
The Old House tour also includes the adjacent 14,000-volume Stone Library built in 1870 and the 18th-century formal garden and orchard.
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