The Adams Birthplaces Dig: Two Presidents Were Born Here, but the Tenants Left the Traces

Two presidents were born in these two saltbox houses in Massachusetts: John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. John Adams drafted his Thoughts on Government here, writing that helped lay the foundation of the Massachusetts Constitution and later the federal Constitution of 1787. But when National Park Service archeologists dug and searched the properties, the people who left the clearest mark were not the Adamses. They were the tenants.

The birthplaces in a watercolor by G. Frankenstein, 1849. Credit: NPS photo.

A family property, often rented out

Deacon John Adams bought the properties in 1720 and enlarged them over 20 years. After he died of influenza in 1761, John Adams inherited the future John Quincy Adams Birthplace with forty acres of farmland, and later acquired his own birthplace. As his political career took the family abroad, keeping up the land became unsustainable, and in 1803 John Quincy Adams took over the farm — ninety-one acres by then — to ease his parents' finances. The family moved out entirely in 1806. The houses stayed in Adams hands for another 200 years, but were often wholly or partly leased, and never held by one occupant for long.

What the ground held

A 1980 geophysical survey and test excavations and a 1983 monitoring project looked for the people who had lived there; a 1991 collections project re-analyzed both and identified 31,699 artifacts from four collections.

• Structures: a well, a cellar's floor and stone walls, and three features that look like shed additions — possibly tenants' workshops.
• Ceramics made up 44 percent of the artifacts, but only 11.6 percent dated to the 1600s or 1700s. Estate inventories from 1680 and 1734 list no ceramics or glass at all, suggesting that tableware was mostly pewter and wood, which rarely survive.
• A trash deposit west of the John Adams Birthplace, from the 1700s to the 1900s — perhaps dumped after a fire — held doll fragments, toys and a whole teacup.

Ceramics recovered from the Adams birthplaces. Credit: NPS photo.

Some tenants left nothing at all: no trace of the apothecary shop run by the wife of shoemaker Tom Hayden, or of the private school Sukey Burrell ran in 1833. They may not have lasted long enough.

Shoes in the walls

The shoemakers left the most. Deacon John Adams was himself a cordwainer. Later came cobblers Adam and Samuel Curtis at the John Adams Birthplace in 1820, and Irishmen John Harrison and Patrick Hailey at the John Quincy Adams Birthplace in 1850. While restoring the John Adams Birthplace, NPS staff found 158 shoes and other leather items hidden in the walls, in two groups from around 1820 and around 1860. The larger, earlier group almost certainly came from the Curtises' shop; why they were hidden is unknown.

A man's black Wellington boot stowed at the Adams birthplaces. NPS photo.

A boy's front-lace boot found hidden at the birthplaces. Credit: NPS photo.

Many hands

Every change to a place — trash thrown out, sheds added, even recent NPS landscaping — leaves a trail. The birthplaces bear two famous names, but lawyers, farmers, teachers, shoemakers and other everyday people shaped them too.

Sources

Based on "The Tenants Whose Residences Raised Two Presidents" from the National Park Service (Adams National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain, drawing on the park's Archeological Collections Management report (1991) and Cultural Landscape Report for Adams Birthplaces (2014). Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.