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Adams family

Clover Adams Takes Pictures of Grief (Her Own)

The famous statue “Grief” memorializes Clover Adams, a talented photographer whose husband wouldn’t let her work be published.

She committed suicide in 1885 by drinking the chemicals she used to develop photographs.

Her husband, historian Henry Adams, commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the draped figure to portray nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

So why did Clover Adams commit suicide? Do her photographs suggest the reason why?

Clover Adams, Photographer

New techniques gave women a chance to explore photography after the Civil War, and Clover Adams went all in. Her photographs convey isolation and limitation. Many of her settings evoke the claustrophobia she may have felt as a woman in Gilded Age America. Others express isolation and the distance between people.

Brooks Adams, Henry’s brother. Photo by Clover Adams.

She lost her mother at an early age, and married a man descended from the famously remote John Quincy Adams. Though they longed for children, they never had any.

“Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable,” wrote her biographer, Natalie Dykstra.

Clover Adams, Brahmin

Clover Adams was born Marian Hooper on Sept. 13, 1843 into a Boston Brahmin family. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, won acclaim for her Transcendentalist poetry. Her father, Robert William Hooper, achieved prominence as a Boston physician. The wealthy Hooper family lived at 114 Beacon St. in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay.

The Hoopers had a history of mental illness.

Self-portrait by Clover Adams.

“I am a ‘Hooper, and if a feeling is very pleasant I feel as if it were wrong,’ Clover Adams wrote to her sister.

Grief marred her pampered childhood. her mother died when she was five, and her Aunt Susan, a surrogate mother, killed herself when she was nine. She grow close to her father—too close for her future husband’s liking.

Marriage

In 1872 at her father’s summer home at Beverly Farms in Massachusetts, she married Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of diplomat and historian Charles Francis Adams. Henry Adams described himself as ‘absurdly in love’ with her, but his brother Charles warned him about the family’s mental instability. “Heavens!–no!–they’re all crazy as coots,” he said when his brother told him he intended to marry Clover.

Henry Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Henry, a workaholic writer and historian, told her how he’d ‘improve’ her once they married. He discouraged her artistic pursuits. In one of his novels, he wrote that a woman ‘cannot both enjoy love and be truly herself in her creative ambition or beliefs.’

When Clover Adams got interested in photography on a trip to New York, he told her that wouldn’t happen again. And when a prestigious magazine wanted to use one of her photographs on the cover, he said no.

Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Washington, D.C.

Five years into their marriage in 1877, Henry and Clover Adams moved to Washington, D.C. She belonged to the literary circle called the Five of Hearts, along with her husband, John Hay, Hay’s wife Clara and Clarence King, the famous geologist who led a double life pretending to be a West Indian railroad porter with a secret family in New York City.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., friend of the Adamses. Photo by Clover Adams.

Her world was a clubby little one: her friend John Hay had an affair with her brother-in-law Brooks Adams’ sister-in-law, Nannie Cabot Lodge.

Her friends viewed her as witty, clever, athletic. Perhaps they sensed her troubled nature. She inspired Henry James to write Daisy Miller in 1878 and Portrait of a Lady in 1881. When she died, James wrote, ‘poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence.’

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

Grief

She remained close to her father, to her husband’s dismay. When he died in April 1885, she lapsed into a depression.

In 1885, the Adamses were building a baronial mansion on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and living in temporary housing on H Street.

On Dec. 6, 1885, Clover Adams drank half a vial of potassium cyanide in the bedroom of their rented home. Henry then found her lying on the floor in front of the fire in the fireplace.

Henry Adams with the family dog. Photo by Clover Adams.

He never mentioned her, not once, in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and he destroyed all her letters and photographs of her. A year after he died her wrote a friend that he hadn’t had the good luck to attend his own funeral. But, he wrote, “I have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.”

With thanks to Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life by Natalie Dykstra. Featured image of the Adams Memorial By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “red_herring” – Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7821686. This story was updated in 2023.

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John Quincy Adams’ Bad Boy Brother Charles

John Quincy Adams’ diary must have been irresistible reading for his bad boy brother Charles.

John Quincy started his diary at the age of 12 because his father insisted on it. He made his first entry on the eve of his voyage to Paris with his father and Charles, then nine.

Bad boy brother Charles and John Quincy Adams in their youth.

On Nov. 19, 1779, John Quincy wrote, “This morning at about 11 o’clock I took leave of my Mamma, my sister, and brother Tommy and went to Boston with Mr. Thaxter, in order to go on board the frigate the Sensible of 28 pounders.”

John Quincy had already accompanied his father once on a diplomatic mission to France during the American Revolution. He had been sturdier and older than Charles, described as “charming,” “sensitive” and “delicate.”

Story of a Bad Boy

The second diplomatic mission starting in 1779 turned out a disaster for young Charles. The Sensible headed into a gale and then sprung a leak. The captain enlisted passengers, including John Quincy, to take turns pumping the ice water out of the ship. The Sensible limped into El Ferrol, the first friendly port it could find, on the northwestern tip of Spain. The Adamses then traveled 1,000 miles overland in a journey John Adams called the worst experience of his life. After a brief time in Paris, they went on to the Netherlands, where John Adams negotiated a loan from the Dutch to the continental American government.

John Adams upon completion of the Treaty of Paris. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums.

John Quincy and Charles enrolled in a Latin school in Amsterdam where the tutors beat them regularly. Their father found out and sent them in December 1780 to another school, the prestigious Leiden University. John Quincy, though, left for St. Petersburg in July as secretary to Francis Dana. The boys’ father realized Charles was terribly homesick and sent him back to Massachusetts.

Charles left London with a chaperone in August of 1781, but his ship didn’t get far. Needing repairs, it went into drydock in Spain. The Adams family didn’t know what happened to him and thought he’d been lost at sea. He arrived home five months later, but by some accounts he had returned a lost boy.

Little survives of the notoriously voluminous Adams’ family papers when it comes to Charles’ disappearance in Spain. Or much else about Charles.

John Quincy kept up his diary for a few months after he embarked on the Sensible, but stopped writing during and after Charles’ departure.

A Sad End

Five years later, in July 1786, Charles had finished his first year at Harvard. He had already started getting into trouble at Harvard, drinking heavily and disturbing the peace.

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy had just been admitted as a junior to ‘the Seat of the Muses,’ as his father called his alma mater. He had started keeping his diary again, and on July 27, 1786, he wrote about something else his bad boy brother had done.

“I perceive Charles has been guilty of a trick which I thought he would despise; that of prying into, and meddling with things which are nothing to him: and ungenerously looking into Papers, (which he knew I wished to keep private,) because I could not keep them under lock and key. If he looks here, he will feel how contemptible a spy is to himself, and to others.”

Charles did graduate from Harvard, and his parents sent him to New York to study law. He lived with Baron von Steuben, believed to be gay, and found him fascinating. Eventually he married, but he had extramarital affairs and failed at the law. Some historians believe Charles was gay as well.

His father later disowned him as a “a mere rake, buck, blood and beast.” Charles died at 30 of cirrhosis of the liver while living in poverty apart from his wife and two daughters.

John Quincy had another bad boy brother: Thomas. The baby of the family, Thomas ended up living with his parents, along with his wife and seven children. He couldn’t support himself or his family, and he vanished for days on drinking binges. He died at 59.

Like Father, Like Son

John Adams famously wrote to his eldest son that he’d only have himself to blame if he didn’t rise to president of the United States. “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre,” he wrote. “And if you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.”

Some speculate that John Adams’ two youngest sons failed under the pressure of his demands.

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams also demanded a great deal of his sons. And like his father, he would have one son who would make him proud and two who would disappoint him.

George Washington Adams

George Washington died at 28, a dissolute drunk who fathered an illegitimate child and may have committed suicide. John lived until 31, but led no happier or soberer a life than his older brother. Only the youngest, Charles Francis Adams, would win acclaim as a diplomat and historian.

John Adams II

This story last updated in 2023.

With thanks to J.L. Bell and his Boston 1775 blog and Steven Lee Carson, Adams Family (History Net).

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The Real People Behind Little Women

A century and a half after Little Women first reached the bookstore shelves, the story of four sisters and their mother still has ardent fans.

Louisa May Alcott attributed the book’s success to its simplicity and truth. And it was true, for she based the characters on her own family. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy were in real life Anna, Louy, Lizzy and May. Alcott modeled Marmee on her mother, Abigail May Alcott, and the absent Father on her own father, Bronson Alcott.

The Alcott family had less stability than the Marches, though. They moved 20 times in 30 years. And unlike the March family, they moved in the leading intellectual circles of the day. Growing up, Louisa knew Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson, her mother’s fourth cousin, helped support them financially.

In many other ways, though, the book stayed true to the Alcott family story.

Father

Louisa May Alcott had a reason, if only subconscious, for writing her father out of the story. Bronson Alcott was a dreamer, a reformer, a philosopher and a hopelessly improvident father. Born on a small farm in Wolcott, Conn., he came from a less distinguished family than his wife. He taught school, but his controversial methods cost him students, and he didn’t do much better when he tried his hand as a Yankee peddler.

Bronson Alcott

Alcott believed in the ‘sweetness of self denial’ — a convenient philosophy for someone who couldn’t support his wife and four daughters.

When Louisa was 10, he moved the family to a utopian community called Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass. (where part of Little Women was filmed in 2019).

Fruitlands

The Fruitlands communards didn’t believe in eating meat, owning property or using animal labor. They dressed only in linen, wore canvas shoes, drank nothing but cold water and bathed in it as well. The women did most of the work while Bronson Alcott traveled, looking for recruits. Finally Louisa’s mother took the four girls to a rented farm and her husband joined them only later.

Until Louisa’s success with Little Women when she was 36 years old, the Alcott family lived in poverty. They depended on the generosity of family and friends, their mother’s inheritance and the wages of the women in the family. Their most permanent home was Orchard House, now a museum in Concord, Mass.

Louisa no doubt described her father when asked her definition of philosophy. “My definition is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends pulling the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.”

Bronson Alcott died March 4, 1888, two days before Louisa died.

Marmee

Abigail May Alcott, or Abba, came from a prominent New England family. Her great-great grandfather was Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall. Dorothy Quincy, her great aunt, had married John Hancock. Her brother, Samuel May, was a well-known Unitarian minister active in promoting peace, temperance, education reform and an end to slavery.

Abigail May Alcott

Abba also had as ancestors three kings: France’s King Robert I, England’s Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. Her cousins, albeit distant, include 11 U.S. presidents: the Bushes, the Adams, the Roosevelts, Warren G. Harding, Gerald Ford, Franklin Pierce, Rutherford B. Hayes and George Washington. Abigail Adams was her third cousin once removed, but she was also distantly related to Edith Carow Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Nancy Reagan.

Like her daughters, she had to work to support the family. In 1848, when Louisa was 15, she took a job as a social worker in Boston, one of the first in Massachusetts. Abba believed in women’s suffrage and temperance and abolition. As a fervent abolitionist, she opened her home to fugitive slaves; the family knew Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

When she died in 1877. Louisa wrote, “She was so loyal, tender, and true, life was hard for her and no one knew all she had to bear but her children.”

Meg

Anna, the oldest Alcott sister, was closest to Louisa during their childhood. She was idealistic like her parents, and she had talent as an actress. She and Louisa often staged amateur theatricals. Though ambitious, Anna resigned herself to marriage and motherhood.

The fictional Meg, from an illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith

“I have a foolish wish to be something great and I shall probably spend my life in a kitchen and die in the poor-house,” she wrote in her diaries.

As a young woman she taught school for a while in Syracuse, N.Y., but returned to the family home in Concord, Mass., in her mid-20s. She and Louisa then formed a drama group, and Anna fell in love with her costar, John Bridge Pratt, during a play called The Loan of a Lover. Their wedding guests included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Franklin Sanborn. Louisa wrote John into Little Women as John Bridge.

Orchard House

Beth

Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, the third Alcott daughter, originally had “Peabody” as her middle name after Bronson Alcott’s friend and teaching assistant, Elizabeth Peabody. Three years later that changed to her grandmother’s maiden name after Bronson and Peabody had a falling out.

Like the character Beth, Elizabeth or Lizzy Alcott caught scarlet fever while helping her mother care for a poor German family. She recovered from the illness, but not fully, and grew progressively weaker over the next two years. She died in her sleep at the age of 22. Of her death, Louisa wrote,

Last week she put her work away, saying the needle was too heavy … Saturday she slept, and at midnight became unconscious, quietly breathing her life away till three; then, with one last look of her beautiful eyes, she was gone.

The fictional Beth, from an illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith

Amy

The real Amy in Little Women was Louise May Alcott’s youngest sister, Abigail May. Her sisters called her Abba or Abby until she reached her 20s, when she asked them to call her May. Louisa used an anagram – Amy for May – to name her fictional character.

May, like Amy, was a talented artist. She gave lessons to Daniel Chester French, who later designed the Lincoln Memorial. May struggled all her life to win success as an artist and to come out from under the shadow of her famous older sister.

May Alcott self-portrait

She illustrated the first edition of Little Women, which critics panned for their anatomical inaccuracy. So she went to Europe because she could study the human body there – something prohibited for women in puritanical New England.

May stood on the cusp of fulfilling her dream as a successful artist when she died before turning 40. She had published a travel guide for American women to study art in Europe. And she had beaten out Mary Cassatt for a spot in the Paris Salon.

May married a Swiss tobacco merchant, not Amy’s boy next door. Ernest Nieriker at 22 was 16 years her junior. They lived in a Paris suburb until she died seven weeks after giving birth. Louisa raised her daughter Louisa, nicknamed Lulu.

Jo

Alcott modeled Jo on herself, an energetic, nature-loving tomboy given to occasional wild moods. Henry David Thoreau taught her for a while, and she had a crush on him, as well as on another of her neighbors, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As a young woman she struggled to support her family while trying to carve out a writing career. There weren’t many jobs available to women then, and none of her jobs paid well. She worked as a companion to invalids, as a maid, as a seamstress and as a teacher, which she hated. In her mid-twenties she got so discouraged she thought about throwing herself into the Charles River.

Louisa May Alcott in her 20s

As she approached 30, Louisa May Alcott went to Washington, D.C., as a Civil War nurse. She caught typhus after three, and her father brought her home. Doctors tried to cure her by giving her mercury, which probably caused her poor health for the last 25 years of her life. Her hair fell out, she had rashes, headaches, rheumatism and vertigo. But she wrote a book about her experience, which earned critical acclaim and allowed her to make a living writing. She wrote pulp fiction under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard.

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 10 weeks, unenthusiastic about it from the start. She only did it because her publisher, Thomas Niles, wanted a girls’ story, and he agreed to publish her father’s book on philosophy only if she did. “And I begin Little Women,” she wrote in her diary in May 1868. “So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

On Aug. 26, 1868. Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary:

“Proof of whole book came. It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.”

Scene from the 1912 Broadway production of Little Women, adapted by Marian de Forest

The book, an instant hit, allowed the Alcott family to live in comfort. When a stroke killed Louisa at age 55, she left an estate of $200,000, about $5 million in today’s money.

Little Women has never been out of print, and an estimated thousand copies are sold every month. It’s been adapted for the theater as a play and a musical, turned into a Japanese anime series, an Indian television serial and a Canadian opera.

The first movie version of Little Women was produced in England in 1917 as a silent film, and a second, U.S. version followed the next year.

The third Little Women appeared on the silver screen in 1933, starring Katharine Hepburn. Then Hollywood remade it in 1949 starring Elizabeth Taylor, and in 1994 starring Winona Ryder. The most recent Little Women movie starring Saoirse Ronan was released in 2019.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Fruitlands By victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40800910. Orchard House By User:victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27754775. Scene from 1912 Broadway production By The Ridgway Company, New York; photograph by White Studio – Everybody's Magazine, page 112, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63332463.

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How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

It took a lifetime of study and reflection for John Adams to come up with his religious credo. In the end, the self-styled church going animal boiled it down to just four words.

He was an elderly ex-president, free of the public spotlight’s glare, when he finally confessed the essence of his faith to an old rival.

Church going Animal

John Adams spent his decades of rural retirement exchanging rich letters with friends and devouring key volumes on foreign faiths. A descendant of Puritan immigrants, he saw the world while serving as an American statesman in revolutionary Europe. Between his diplomatic tasks, Adams grew fascinated with comparing different religious beliefs. Frequent travel heightened his interest.

Adams was a lifelong student of church and state. He took notes on sermons, looked up biblical references, and explored aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Writing to old colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush in the summer of 1811, Adams reflected on the pivotal role of religion in his life.

“It is notorious enough, that I have been a Church going Animal for Seventy Six years, i.e. from the Cradle,” he wrote.

John Adams, Church going Animal

A Providential Turn

Like one of his beloved oak trees, Adams’s faith had deep roots in New England culture. As a young man, he studied theology at Harvard College and considered becoming a Congregationalist minister. Back in Braintree, his family parish (now the United First Parish Church of Quincy, Unitarian Universalist), was battling through a controversy.

In John Adams’ words, the church’s new pastor Lemuel Briant was “a jocular and liberal scholar and divine.” A teenaged John Adams heard plenty of Briant’s radical theology. Shedding older Puritan ways, Briant told his community that practicing a Christian life–rather than repeating dogma–would open up a path to salvation, but only if they chose it.

Briant’s sermons sent a ripple. This idea was a fairly new one for worshippers to weigh.

Several local clergy took issue with Briant’s message. As the controversy unspooled, the preacher’s wife left him, after claiming that he had committed “several scandalous sins.”

Scandalous Sins

Church officials launched a full investigation into Briant’s moral character. From 1749 to 1753, Adams kept an eye on the pamphlets that supported or criticized Briant’s beliefs.

“I may say I was born & bred in the centre of Theological & Ecclesiastical controversy,” he recalled. “It broke out like the eruption of a volcano and blazed with portentious aspect for many years.”

Though he agreed with Briant’s spiritual outlook, Adams was troubled by the way that society had treated the minister. Lemuel Briant made it through the inquiry, but his health was broken, and he died in 1754.

To Adams, the whole debate bred a “Spirit of Dogmatism and Bigotry.” He was convinced that pursuing a career in the pulpit would “involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.” Far better, he thought, to study law.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/church-going-animal-ufpc.jpg

Where John Adams started out as a church-going animal. The United First Parish Church of Quincy, Mass.

Puritan Echoes

By 1765, John Adams had opened his practice and begun a family with wife Abigail. New England’s unique religious history ran alongside his commute between Boston and Braintree.

Take the rows of locust trees lining Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill,” which reminded him of the Puritans’ fiery witchcraft trials, and of “that memorable Victory over the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

He knew little for certain about his own Puritan ancestors, but John Adams was proud to invoke them and their legacy of dissent. When he sat down to write his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law that summer, Adams harkened back to family history. He was anxious to show that “ordinary” men and women could overturn tyranny, no matter the conditions they inherited.

“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever,” Adams wrote.

The Cost of Freedom

According to John Adams, harnessing Providence’s will with a liberal education had emboldened the Puritans’ Great Migration. He applauded their drive to reform the Church of the England, and to seek out new streams of profit in the early American colonies.

Adams had a political lesson for his peers of 1765, too. He drew on the actions of the “vexed” Puritans to ignite the revolutionary imagination of his family and friends. Adams reminded readers that Puritan colonists had laid their faith in American success, opening schools and carving out towns. Their freedom, he wrote, came at great cost.

“Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker,” he wrote. “But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

A World Within

John Adams spent much of the 1770s and the 1780s on the road, traveling first to the Continental Congress, and then serving as an American minister to Europe. As he moved around the Continent, Adams sought out diverse religious experiences in France, the Netherlands, and England. He recorded foreign rituals and new beliefs, and he grew to appreciate the sensory impact of religion.

While he embraced the idea of religious toleration, Adams did not always find it easy to practice. An early experience at a Catholic mass in Philadelphia left him dazzled by the organ music but choking on incense. The “Grandmother Church” had “Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant,” John told Abigail. “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” He remained curious about beliefs beyond his own, acquiring books and writing to clergy.

Adams spent his final years at Peacefield, immersed in reading about foreign faiths and cultures. When he and Thomas Jefferson renewed their correspondence in 1812, religion became a favorite subject. “I have been a diligent Student for many years in Books whose Titles you have never Seen,” Adams teased his former rival.

At Jefferson’s request, and after a lifetime of seeking, John Adams unveiled his religious credo: “Be Just and Good.”

End Notes

Notes on the author of How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history at Boston University. She is the series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @sarageorgini. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Adams. Portrait, pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, ca. 1766. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and United First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalist), Quincy, Massachusetts.

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Six Presidential Houses in New England

Before presidential libraries, there were presidential houses, and every New England state has at least one.

Massachusetts, of course, was the birthplace of the most presidents: the two Adamses, John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush. You could almost count Calvin Coolidge, as he lived in Northampton for years, and even George Washington spent nearly a year in Cambridge as commander in chief of the colonial military.

Coolidge, though, was born in Vermont, and New Hampshire gave us Franklin Pierce. No president came from Rhode Island, though Dwight Eisenhower spent considerable time in Newport. And if it weren’t for the Bushes, Connecticut and Maine would have little claim to presidential roots.

So in celebration of President’s Day, we bring you six presidential houses. If you know of another, please mention it in the comments section.

37 Hillhouse Ave.

37 Hillhouse Ave., where President George W. Bush lived for two years.

The housing shortage after World War II forced Yale University to convert an Italianate mansion into housing for married student veterans. George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara lived there while he studied at Yale and they started their family. George W. Bush lived there until he was two, and then the family moved to Texas.

The elder president had left Yale as a sophomore to serve in the Navy. Of his living conditions, he wrote, “Not to make too much of the postwar housing shortage, but there were a dozen other veterans’ families sharing the house with us — each with one child, except for Bill and Sally Reeder, who had twins. That made 40 in all.”

It couldn’t have been that much of a hardship. Both Mark Twain and Charles Dickens described Hillhouse Avenue as ‘the most beautiful street in America.’

Today, Yale uses the building for its Economics Department.

Walker Point

The main house of the Bush compound at Walker Point.

Americans grew familiar with the Bush compound during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who held news conferences while staying there. His son, George W. Bush, also stayed at the home during his presidency. So did a half dozen world leaders — and George H.W. Bush’s political opponent, former president Bill Clinton.

The Bush family has used the Walker Point estate since the days of George H.W. Bush’s great-grandparents.

Walker Point juts out into the Atlantic Ocean in Kennebunkport, Maine, and includes a large Shingle Style house, eight other residences, tennis courts, a dock and a sports field. Though the Bushes still own it, tourists enjoy the scenic drive along Ocean Avenue, where they can glimpse the property.

Peacefield

One of many presidential houses in Massachusetts, both Adams lived at Peacefield in Quincy.

Massachusetts has produced more presidents than any other New England state and can claim the most presidential houses: John and John Quincy Adams, who lived at Peacedale in Quincy. John F. Kennedy, of course, was born in Brookline, summered in Hyannis Port and lived in Boston. George H.W. Bush was born in Milton, but his family soon moved to Greenwich, Conn.

Massachusetts also has quite a presidential houses known as summer White Houses. Calvin Coolidge, who lived the greater part of his life in Northampton, spent a summer in Swampscott. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama summered on Martha’s Vineyard. Less well-known summer visitors include Franklin Pierce, who spent time in Andover, Mass., and Grover Cleveland, who vacationed in Marion and Bourne on the South Shore. Cleveland’s summer home in Bourne, Gray Gables, was torn down but rebuilt to resemble the original.

William Howard Taft summered twice in Beverly until his hostess floated her house to Marblehead to discourage him. (She didn’t like the crowds he attracted.)

We won’t even count the presidents who lived in Massachusetts while attending Harvard. Okay, we will: the Adamses, Kennedy, Obama, both Roosevelts and Rutherford B. Hayes.

But since two presidents lived most of their lives in Quincy, we chose Peacefield, the Adams Family homestead. Built by a Loyalist in 1731 and abandoned during the American Revolution, John and Abigail bought the house in 1787. They lived in London at the time, and found the house disappointing when they returned. Abigail said it looked like ‘a wren’s nest.’ But she spent years renovating and expanding it while John attended to his political duties.

John Quincy Adams also lived at Peacefield, as did his son, the statesman Charles Francis Adams and his grandson, historian Henry Adams.

Peacefield today belongs to the U.S. government as the Adams National Historical Park. It comprises 11 buildings, including the birthplaces of John and John Quincy Adams.

For more information, click here.

Franklin Pierce Homestead

The Pierce Homestead, one of two presidential houses in New Hampshire where Franklin Pierce lived.

Franklin Pierce grew up in the gracious home his father built after serving in the American Revolution. He may even have been born there in 1804, the year his father built the house.

Benjamin Pierce had bought 200 acres in Hillsborough, N.H., after the new state turnpike opened nearby. Benjamin Pierce ran a tavern, and on Christmas Eve in 1824 hosted a dinner for 21 Revolutionary War veterans. Franklin probably attended — or helped serve — the dinner. Benjamin Pierce later served two terms as New Hampshire’s governor.

Franklin lived in the family home until for 23 years until 1834, when he married. He had spent seven years away at school, college and law study in Portsmouth.

His wife, Jane Appleton, didn’t like Hillsborough, and they moved to Concord. Benjamin Pierce died in 1839 and left the house to his son-in-law. Franklin’s sister, Elizabeth, married John McNeil, Jr., a general in the War of 1812.

After his disappointing single term as president, Franklin Pierce briefly returned to his childhood home in Hillsborough.

New Hampshire actually has two Franklin Pierce presidential houses: the one in Hillsborough, and the Pierce Manse in Concord, also a house museum. For more information, click here.

Eisenhower House

Eisenhower House, one of Rhode Island’s presidential houses.

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife Mamie summered in Newport, R.I., during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 he stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. He moved to a mansion at Fort Adams.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

Another of Rhode Island’s presidential houses, Hammersmith Farm, was the site of John F. Kennedy’s marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. As president, Kennedy occasionally visited the farm, still in private hands.

Eisenhower House is now part of Fort Adams State Park and available for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Birthplace of Calvin Coolidge, one of several presidential houses in Plymouth Notch.

Calvin Coolidge’s birthplace is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.” Coolidge cannily used it as a backdrop to hone his image as a thrifty Yankee.

Coolidge was actually sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Coolidge often visited his family home, a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property and a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings comprise the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Click on the image to buy the ebook from Amazon. Paperback version now available.

If you really want to know what a president and first lady were like, find out what they ate. The New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President, tells you about the six New England presidents, their servants, their families, their friends and how they struggled to make the White House presentable for public entertainment. Click here to buy the ebook; here for the paperback.

Images: Graves-Gilman House By Eumenes12 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5447836. Walker Point, By Zollernalb – own work, eigene Arbeit, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2730841. Franklin Pierce Homestead By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20697770. Plymouth Notch By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34788716. Peacefield by By Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3162095.

This story about presidential houses was updated in 2023.

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12 Fascinating Facts About Independence Day

Independence Day from the get-go has been a rowdy holiday with ringing bells, gunfire, cannon fire, fireworks, feasting, speeches and toasts.

Over the years, people tried to turn it into something else: a platform for temperance speeches, a chance for immigrants to express their ‘American-ness,’ a ‘safe-and-sane’ holiday. But it always seems to revert to a rowdy celebration.

Here then, is a list of 12 fascinating facts about the Independence Day.

1. Adams Messed Up

It didn’t really happen this way. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull.

John Adams got the date wrong. In a letter to his wife Abigail from Philadelphia on July 3, 1776, he wrote, “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.” You can understand his mistake, since the Continental Congress approved independence on July 2. And all the signers of the Declaration of Independence didn’t exactly gather around the parchment and sign at once. Some had left Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. Moreover, the Declaration didn’t get printed with all the names of the signers until January 1777, by Mary Katherine Goddard in Baltimore.

2. A Looong Independence Day Tradition

Boston fireworks, 2011.

Fireworks go all the way back to 1777, when Boston and Philadelphia held the first displays. The Continental Congress authorized the fireworks in Philadelphia. And in Boston, “Col. Crafts illuminated his park on the commons, threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.”

3. Quite a Streak

Charles Francis Adams

The Adams family participated in official Independence Day celebrations for 116 consecutive years. It started from the time John signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and ended in 1892, when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., gave a speech at the First Church in Quincy, Mass.

4. Independence Day Toasts

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

During the 19th century, people loved to drink patriotic toasts on the Independence celebrations. Tipplers carefully prepared the toasts and often published them in the local newspaper. They frequently toasted George Washington. For example, a toast from Lexington, Mass., in 1814, went like this: “The memory of Washington. May his name no more be profaned by Hypocrites, as that of Jesus has been by the Jesuits.”

5. Independence Day Time Capsule

Massachusetts State House from the Boston Common

On the Fourth of July in 1795, Paul Revere and Gov. Sam Adams laid the cornerstone for the Massachusetts State House in Boston. They also buried a copper time capsule. It contained a pine tree shilling coin from 1652, a copper medal engraved with an image of George Washington, several newspapers and a silver plate thought to be engraved by Paul Revere. State officials opened the time capsule in 2014.

6. Career Launch

Young Daniel Webster

On the Fourth of July 1800, Daniel Webster launched his political career as an 18-year-old Dartmouth junior. He was chosen to deliver a speech at the college because of his reputation as a speaker and debater. In the speech he praised the veterans of the Revolution, George Washington and the unifying authority of the U.S. Constitution.

7. Coincidence?

Thomas Jefferson

John Adams died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His last words were “Jefferson still survives.” He got it wrong; Jefferson died five hours earlier. Only one signer of the Declaration still lived in 1826: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Md., who died six years later at the age of 95.

8. Playing with Fire

Aftermath of the Great Portland Fire.

A Fourth of July firecracker in 1866 started the Great Portland Fire in Maine. The conflagration, the worst to date in the United States, burned 1800 buildings. It left 10,000 homeless and killed two. Fireworks, though, didn’t cause as many Fourth of July fatalities as toy guns. The toy bullets — blank cartridges, actually — pierced the skin and caused tetanus, the leading cause of Independence Day deaths in the 19th century.

Henry Ward Beecher speaking at Woodstock, Conn, President Grant seated. From a Harper’s Weekly engraving courtesy Library of Congress.

9. Bor-ing

Starting in 1870, Henry C. Bowen, a businessman, hosted the country’s largest Fourth of July party in Woodstock, Conn., at his Roseland Cottage. The event featured many, many, many speeches; so many, that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes tried to get out of going in 1877. Bowen didn’t drink, and President Ulysses S. Grant had to sneak a cocktail on the porch at the first party in 1870.

The Boston Pops plays Stars and Stripes Forever.

10. Independence Day Pops

The Boston Pops Orchestra has played Stars and Stripes Forever at the end of its concerts since 1899, two years after John Philip Sousa composed it. Arthur Fiedler included it in the first Independence Day Pops concert on the Esplanade in 1929. The Pops has played it ever since, the flag always dropping in the final moments of the piece. As many as 500,000 people show up for the concert.

Americanization Day poster

11. Americanization Day

Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis kicked off the first Americanization Day with a Fourth of July speech in 1915 at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Americanization Day, an attempt to crowd out Independence Day, responded to nearly two decades of increasing immigration, a sore spot for many Americans. The Americanization Day movement set about to reshape the day’s image around themes of immigrants embracing American culture. It didn’t last.

12. No White House Celebration

Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

The saddest Independence Day in the White House was probably in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge spent most of the day at the bedside of his 16-year-old son. Calvin Coolidge, Jr., had developed septic poisoning after he played tennis without socks and it caused a blister that got infected. He died on July 7.

With thanks to James R. Heintze’s Fourth of July Celebrations Database. Boston Fireworks image By Pablo Valerio – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15723763. This story was updated in 2023.

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