Built by Colonel Josiah Quincy (1710–1784) in 1770, Quincy House, located in Quincy, Massachusetts, was the family’s summer home, the place to which they retreated after a busy social season in Boston or Cambridge. In the nineteenth century the Quincys lived in a succession of at least seven houses in the winter, but always returned for solace and renewal to this house by the sea. A visitor in 1875 described its attraction: [The mansion] is placed on the gentle swell of ground at the extremity of the noblest private estate in New England. Its five hundred broad acres of meadow and woodland give the idea that you have suddenly dropped into an English park come down since the Conquest by entail. A broad and leafy avenue a quarter of a mile long leads from the highroad to the mansion. There are delicious glimpses of the sea, of Boston Harbor and its islands, and of the countless white sails continually winging their way into port.
shaped the modern world—John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, and the Marquis de Lafayette, among others, as well as some no longer as well known, such as Prince Carl Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, whose military leadership contributed to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Literary figures and artists who visited the Quincys included John Trumbull, Washington Allston, Washington Irving, and Gilbert Stuart. Eliza Susan was keenly aware of the historical importance of the people with whom she spent time. One summer day in 1818, she accompanied the famous orator Daniel Webster to the home of John and Abigail Adams. During the carriage ride she asked Webster what he thought of John
When the Quincy family donated the house to Historic New England in 1937, many of the original furnishings had already been dispersed or sold. To re-create the look of the 1880s photographs (inset), Historic New England augmented Quincy family pieces with other objects from its collections. A reproduction was used for the Copley portrait of Colonel Josiah Quincy. ABOVE
Eliza Susan came to her interest in history inevitably. She slept in the room that Benjamin Franklin used when he visited her great-grandfather. She grew up surrounded by notable historical figures. The participants in dinner conversations at Quincy House included players who influenced events that 10
Historic New England Summer 2014