Old House at Peacefield and Stone Library

The Old House at Peacefield, formally known as the Adams Mansion, was purchased by John Adams in 1787 upon his return from diplomatic service in Europe. Adams renamed it “Peacefield” in celebration of the peace treaty he had helped negotiate to end the Revolutionary War. The house became the center of Adams family life for the next four generations, and today it preserves furniture, art, books, and personal objects accumulated across 140 years of continuous Adams family occupation — one of the most intact collections of a single American family anywhere in the country.

John Adams died in the house on July 4, 1826 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the same day as Thomas Jefferson, his friend, rival, and fellow Founding Father. His son John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, also used the house as his summer home throughout his post-presidential years and died in Washington in 1848 after suffering a stroke on the floor of the House of Representatives, where he continued to serve as a congressman for seventeen years after leaving the White House.

The Stone Library, built in 1873 by Charles Francis Adams to house his father John Quincy Adams’s personal library, stands as a separate granite building on the Peacefield grounds. The fireproof construction was intentional — the family had watched wooden buildings and paper archives burn across New England for generations. The library holds approximately 14,000 volumes, including books annotated by both presidents, a collection of diplomatic documents, and the working library of one of the most intellectually prolific figures in American political history.