The Adams Houses: The Oldest Presidential Birthplaces in Quincy, MA

The Adams Houses, the two oldest surviving American presidential birthplaces, are clapboard vernacular houses located on Franklin Street in Quincy, MA. John Quincy Adams Birthplace, built in 1717, is the older of the two. John Quincy Adams was born there in 1767.

John Adams Birthplace, constructed in 1722, incorporated several reused timbers dated to 1678, possibly from an earlier house on the site. This house features chamfered summer beams and reused rafters originally supporting clasped purlins, a framing practice common in England but rare among surviving buildings in the United States. John Adams was born there in 1735, traditionally in the east chamber of the saltbox. In 1744, his father also acquired the neighboring house at 141 Franklin Street and may have added pilastered, pedimented door surrounds to both houses.

John Adams took ownership of the two houses in 1774, although he and Abigail often occupied homes in Boston until the Revolution. Both properties were sold to John Quincy Adams in 1803. He used it as a summer home until 1806, while his brother, Thomas Boylston Adams, occupied the older house from 1810 to about 1820. The houses were rented out thereafter, often to workers in the stone quarries behind the houses.

Architect Robert Swain Peabody listed both houses in his 1877 study of colonial architecture, but preservation efforts began only after 1892 when the Adams family was criticized for indifference. A new Quincy Historical Society leased 141 Franklin Street, beginning restoration in 1896. The Daughters of the Revolution rented John Adams Birthplace and restored it the following year. John Adams Birthplace was restored in 1897 with the east rooms representing the supposed seventeenth-century origins of the house, while the west rooms are finished with eighteenth-century woodwork.

The houses remained in the Adams family into the twentieth century. Both homes were sold to the city in 1940 to foster “civic virtue and patriotism” and were acquired by the National Park Service in 1978. They are now part of the Adams Historical Park.