Adams National Historical Park

Adams National Historical Park was established in 1946 and encompasses eleven historic structures across Quincy, Massachusetts, associated with John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and the broader Adams family. The National Park Service visitor center on Hancock Street serves as the departure point for guided trolley tours connecting the Peacefield mansion, the Stone Library, the two presidential birthplaces on Franklin Street, and the United First Parish Church where both presidents are interred.

The Adams family’s story spans the full arc of early American history. John Adams was a delegate to the Continental Congress, a co-author of the Declaration of Independence, the first American minister to Great Britain, the first Vice President, and the second President of the United States. His son John Quincy Adams served as Secretary of State under James Monroe, negotiated the Adams-Onís Treaty that acquired Florida and established the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, and then served as the sixth President before returning to Congress as a representative from Massachusetts for seventeen more years.

Quincy itself — known as the “City of Presidents” — has the unique distinction of being the birthplace of two American presidents from the same family, a claim shared only by Braintree (the colonial name for the area), and is the only American city to have produced two presidents from the same generation of a single family. The park’s trolley tours connect the geographically dispersed sites into a coherent narrative of the Adams legacy in Massachusetts and American political history.