Any Given Sunday

[rivlee]

Today I went to the Adams National Historical Park, which I've been meaning to do, pretty much since I moved here in August 2006. I ride by part of the park every single day on my way to work, and you can't set foot in Quincy without hiting some site about the Adams. The tour starts at the Vistor's Center which takes you from Quincy Center, to the birth house of John Adams and John Quincy Adams (right next to each other) in West Quincy/East Braintree. After a rapid tour of that site you go back in to my part of Quincy (Wollaston) for a tour of "The Old House," the home which was to be John and Abigail's Adams retirement home and in which many generations of Adams' lived. The difference between the two houses, besides where they sit in the general life-timeline, is that The Old House actually houses the bedroom furniture, artifacts, everything of the Adams family. Up to an including one room which contains furniture John and Abigail used in the White House, which they bought second-hand from Paris. Of the two, The Old House is my favorite, for it rest on garden grounds, contains the Stone Library, which houses the massive book collection of John and John Quincy Adams (their papers are in the Boston Public Lib. and the Mass State Archives) and the fact that it's just a freaking awesome place. It holds the Amistad Bible for crying out loud. One funny thing: a hallway in The Old House is lined with books meant to "reflect" the books now housed in the Stone Library. Most of them are from Brattle Book Store, which I know, because I own many of those exact books in those exact editions from the late 1800s and the 1900s. Also, they're easy enough to find on the $1, $3, and $5 book carts. Anyway, someone either decided to be funny or not be historically accurate, and a copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital (first published in 1867, 21 years after John Quincy Adams' death) is on the bookshelf. I wish I could've taken a pic, but no photography inside the houses.

The tour is relatively cheap, $5 per person, free to anyone under the age of 16. My tour today was actually free due to National Parks Week.


The Birth Houses:



















The Old House, grounds, Stone Library