I just finished listening to "John Adams" by David McCullough, so venturing out to Quincy to see John Adam's birth place and residency felt like I was back inside the book following his life again. We had an hour before the John Adams tour began, so we used the time to take a guided tour of the United First Parish Church where John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and their wives are entombed.
The congregation of the church was established in 1639, and the church building we visited today is the 3rd built by the congregation. John Adams donated land to help fund the building, but he died 2 years before the church was dedicated in 1828. John Adams and his wife Abigail were first buried in the Hancock cemetery, but John Quincy Adams built a crypt under the church, and the coffins of his parents were moved there. Upon their deaths John Quincy and his wife, Louisa Catherine, were also buried in the Hancock cemetery. Later their son, Charles Francis Adams, had the crypt expanded and moved his parents' coffins there as well.
The little wooden house where John Adams was born, this 18th century gem, now stands on a rather busy street surrounded by modern businesses. Less then 50 yards away stands the house where John and Abigail Adams lived until, anticipating their return from Europe, they acquired the house of Leonard Vassall built in 1731.
Abigail significantly expanded the house, which originally only had 2 rooms on the main floor, 2 bedrooms and an attic. Adams returned to live in the house he refered to as Peacefield permanently in 1801 after losing the presidential election to Thomas Jefferson. The house was inherited by John Quincy Adams upon John Adams's death, and remained in the Adams family until 1946, when the family gave the house to the United States.Unfortunately, photography is not allowed inside any of the houses. Peacefield, even after all the additionals the Adamses built, seemed a lot smaller then what I imagined while reading the book. We also did not see John Adams's beloved books, as his library is now housed in a special room in the Boston Public Library.
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A couple of minor corrections:
John Quincy Adams donated the granite for the construction of our newest (1828) building, not the land. We already had a wooden structure church on the current site, just to the north of the current building. This was before the Adams joined the congregation. Note that John Quincy donated the granite, not the cost of removing the granite from his quarry.
The second is that John Quincy petitioned the congregation for permission to entomb his mother and father in the crypts of our church. He was given permission and subsequent to his and Louisa Catherine's (his wife) deaths, the congregation decided to enlarge the crypts to accommodate the remains of both John Quincy and Louisa Catherine.
We are an active Unitarian Universalist congregation and are proud to be one of only two churches to entomb the remains of a president, and we have two!
Thank you so much for your comments and corrections! I perhaps misunderstood the tour yesterday. I thought that John Adams set aside a piece of his farm land to form a fund (from the proceeds of this land) to help raise the money to build the church. Is that not correct?
Unfortunately not. His contribution was the cost of the granite itself. The congregation paid for the labor to harvest and deliver the granite to the site to the tune of about $21,000, a huge amount for those times. The model wooden structure you saw at the foot of the stairs is a replica of what stood on the site just to the north of the current church, about where Abigail's statue is now.
On a side note, we have the records of all the construction done at the church and all subsequent work. the colors you saw in the sanctuary and vestibule were the exact same colors as the original work. During the reconstruction 8 years ago (that cost the congregation $1.7 million) we had the local paint store translate the color numbers of 1828 into today's colors.
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You may want to do a little more research on the matter of John Adams and his benevolence. By two deeds, Adams gifted several parcels of land in Quincy and Braintree to the Town of Quincy, the income and profits of which were to fund the construction of your church (and the Adams Academy) and the congragation was entitled to "use the stones laying in the fields" for the construction of the Stone Temple. The Town of Quincy managed the lands and generated a substantial portion of the money needed to build the stone temple. As to expanding the crypt to accomodate JQA and his wife, Catherine, the woman writing, "Helen," had it right - Charles Francis Adams initiated the enlargement of the crypt. He paid for this expansion just as JQA has paid for the original contruction of the John & Abigal crypt. It was not at the suggestion of the congragation. I have the original documents to evidence this.
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