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The Calvin Coolidge Homestead: A President Springs Up in The Vermont Hills

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It boggles the mind to think of it, but in 1924 the United States was run out of the second floor of a store in Plymouth Notch, Vt. The inauspicious town is the site of President Calvin Coolidge’s birth, his swearing in as president and his summer White House in the year 1924.

The Plymouth Notch buildings now belong to the President Calvin Coolidge Homestead District. The district includes more than a dozen buildings, some mostly original and others restored as closely as possible to the days when Coolidge lived there.

We’ll focus for our purposes on the family store and the boyhood home of a man who made it all the way to the White House by relying on the values he learned growing up on a farm in a small town, the hard work that was second nature to his family and the ethics all of this imbued in him. It may be hard to believe in this day, but the proof is here in Plymouth Notch.

Coolidge Family History in Vermont

Captain John Coolidge was the first Coolidge to settle in Plymouth. Coolidge, born in 1756 in Massachusetts, served in the American Revolution. He used his pay for his service to buy farmland in Plymouth, and established the family in the notch. John was the great, great grandfather of President Calvin Coolidge, and founder of the two family industries: farming and politics.

John’s son Calvin Galusha Coolidge continued the family farm, and also served as a representative in the Vermont House of Representatives and numerous local offices. His son John picked up where he left off.

John Coolidge, father to a president. was a Civil War veteran and dynamic businessman. He served in the legislature and worked as farmer, blacksmith, bricklayer, mason, carriage maker, harness maker, teacher, store owner, banker and insurance broker. He was also one of the founders of the Coolidge Cheese Factory in 1890, which is still part of the Coolidge Homestead.

On July 4, 1872, the little town of Plymouth would have been alive with excitement both in celebration of the nation’s independence and the birth of another baby boy – John Calvin Coolidge, future president of the United States.

From the backhouse to the White House

The building that housed the Coolidge store in Plymouth Notch was built for that purpose sometime prior to 1835. It was a typical two-story store building with a storage wing on the southern side. At the rear of the store, a small house was built some time later. By 1872, the little house at the rear of the store was occupied by John and Victoria Coolidge, parents of the future president.

Coolidge general store

After a few difficult years, the Coolidge family moved into the Coolidge Homestead, a home purchased by the family in 1876. The future president would live here continuously through 1887, when he began schooling at the Black River Academy at Ludlow. Over the next two dozen years Calvin would steadily build a political career in neighboring Massachusetts, progressing from mayor of Northampton to the state senate, the governorship and finally to the office off the vice president of the United States.

But Coolidge stayed in close touch with his roots, returning frequently to Plymouth Notch for vacations and reunions.

August 1923 found Coolidge back visiting his childhood homestead, now home to his father and stepmother, Carrie. Word arrived from Washington, D.C. that President Warren G. Harding had died of cardiac arrest. Coolidge’s father, a notary public, awakened him with the news. John Coolidge also gave his son the oath of office standing in the dining room of his childhood home, the family Bible nearby.

President Coolidge returned to Washington. President Harding had been a very popular president at the time of his death. Scandalous stories and news of his affairs began to leak out afterwards, dragging down his reputation. The situation was tailor made for Coolidge. His reputation had always been that of a dry, no-nonsense New England Puritan, and it carried him to re-election as president in 1924.

In 1927, Coolidge announced he would not seek reelection in 1928. Philosophically, he believed that another four years, which would have left him in office for more than 11 years, was too long for one man to hold power. Personally, he was exhausted. He died in 1933 in semi-retirement at Northampton.

A Summer White House

For one glorious summer, in 1824, Plymouth Notch served as the White House. In that era, Washington was considered too hot to be healthy in summers. Presidents and congressmen routinely left for extended summer recess.

Coolidge decided he would spend the summer recess of 1924 at his family home in Vermont, where his son had recently been buried after an untimely death. His office? The inauspicious second floor of his father’s general store, with a telephone to tend to pressing government affairs.

While there he attended to business and entertained. Industrialists Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone were among the guests at  the humble Coolidge homestead. The Secret Service had to camp out in tents.

That the laconic and frugal ‘Silent Cal’ could have emerged from such a hard-working and wholesome place as Plymouth Notch to become president may seem like a fiction. But it happened, and the President Calvin Coolidge Homestead District is proof, complete with a quilt the president worked on himself, furniture he constructed, a video showing him harvesting hay and a grave of a president that is inspiring by its humble nature. It is open seasonally, offering tours and cheese for sale.

The Calvin Coolidge Visitor Center is located at 3780 Rte. 100A in Plymouth, VT. The Aldrich House, the site’s office, is located at 249 Coolidge Memorial Rd. For more information visit the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site website.

Photos Courtesy of the Library of Congress

For more information on the history of the buildings at the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, read its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. 

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Sherman Adams, the New Hampshire Logger Who Ran the White House

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Sherman Adams, a grocer’s son turned log driver, catapulted into the White House after a dozen years in politics. He served as President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, perhaps his most trusted advisor and the second most powerful person in Washington.

Some people, especially members of Congress, hated him for his abrupt manner. Others, including Eisenhower, were devoted to him.

Sherman Adams

Eisenhower called him “My right hand man, the only person who really understands what I am trying to do.”

Described as spare, steely-eyed, 140 pounds, Adams had such a horror of wasting time that he didn’t say hello when he answered the telephone. He simply expected the person on the other end to start talking right away.

He was viewed as so powerful that a standing joke went, “What if Adams should die and Eisenhower becomes President of the United States?”

And then in 1958 he lost it all because of a coat.

Sherman Adams

He was born Jan. 8, 1899, in his grandfather’s Baptist parsonage in East Dover, Vt. His father, a grocer, moved the family to Providence, R.I., where Adams grew up. He went to Dartmouth College, where he headed the Outing Club.

“Some fierce, moody New Hampshire demon burned in Adams in his youth,” wrote Richard Strout for the New York Times in 1956. Strout noted Adams was so driven he once hiked 83 miles in 24 hours.

When the U.S. entered World War I. he left college to join the Marines. He then returned to Hanover and earned a degree in economics.

Adams then got a job as a walking boss, supervising far-flung logging camps in the northern woods. But he also helped out on river drives. “Being a little guy, he’d be right up to his belly in that cold water,” an old woodsman told Time. 

He rose through the rugged lumber business to treasurer of the Parker-Young Co., in Lincoln, N.H. Parker-Young understood the value of political connections, and encouraged Adams to run for office. In 1940 he won the first of two terms as a state representative, serving as Speaker of the House in his second term. Adams then ran for and won a seat in Congress in 1944.

After just one term he ran for the Republican Party’s nomination for governor and lost. He tried again in 1948 with a happier outcome.

As governor, he earned a reputation for frugality. He brought his lunch to work. On disappointing days in the corner office he might come home at night, stomp by the dinner his wife had made and retire to his room without a word.

A New Era

A seemingly minor change ushered in a new political era. New Hampshire House Speaker Robert Upton was peeved the 1948 New Hampshire primary had gone unnoticed in the recent presidential election. He sponsored a bill to replace the name of delegates to the presidential convention with candidates’ names. Adams grumbled that it wouldn’t make any difference, but he signed it anyway.

It made a difference.

New Hampshire always held its primary early, at Town Meeting time. The reason? Towns didn’t see any reason to heat the meeting house twice in winter.

That first- in-the-nation presidential primary became a bellwether for the election. It was said for decades that no one could win the party’s nomination without winning New Hampshire. The primary also gave obscure New Hampshire politicians like Sherman Adams a career opportunity. As a liberal Republican he liked Ike more than the conservative senator from Ohio, Bob Taft. And so he campaigned for Eisenhower, who won the primary and put his trust in Sherman Adams.

Eisenhower himself changed something else when he won election. He created the chief of staff job. He’d had great success with his military chiefs of staff, and intended to replicate it as president. He ran his administration, unlike his democratic predecessors, by delegating responsibility through clear channels of authority. Sherman Adams stood at the top of that channel.

President Eisenhower

As Chief of Staff

Reporters described Adams as having the dedication of a vestal virgin and the temperament of a grizzly with a barked shin.

Adams rubbed many people the wrong way. He often replied to requests with one word, “No.” Thus he got the nickname,  “The Abominable No Man.”

Part of his job was to iron out differences within the administration. He brought together department and agency heads to negotiate a solution. If they didn’t come up with one, he would write it himself.  “And his is the one that goes to President Eisenhower marked with the all-important scrawl: “O.K., S.A.,” reported Time.

He fiercely protected the president’s time. Strout, in his New York Times profile of Adams, described how one day Nestor Hill of Hyannis, Mass., caught a 100-pound halibut. He decided to bring it to President Eisenhower. Accompanied by his congressman, Hill brought the fish to the West Wing in a wooden crate filled with ice. Adams interceded, telling him to get the damn thing out of the crate. Then he posed for a picture with the fish so Eisenhower wouldn’t have to.

Sometimes he was too fierce. He once emerged from his office to find two secretaries crying. He retreated into his office, where his assistant told him he had been abrupt and somewhat rude. Adams asked what he should do. “I think you ought to say something to them,” the assistant said. So Adams went out again and said, “Hiya, honey,” according to a 1956 story in Time magazine. That brought on another avalanche of tears.

The Vicuna Coat

Sherman Adams had another side, as well. He was passionately loved classical music. He also showed up at the White House on weekends in suede shoes and a sport coat and drove a sporty roadster convertible.

Bernard Goldfine, a Massachusetts textile manufacturer, had been having problems with the Federal Trade Commission. He asked Adams to intercede, and gave Adams a valuable rug and a vicuna coat. Made with the fine, silky wool of the delicate camel-like animal in the Andes, it was a luxury item that cost $895 in 1958.

Washington columnist Jack Anderson broke the story of the vicuna coat in 1958. It happened at a bad time for Adams. During the Truman presidency, Republicans in Congress had attacked the Democratic administration for influence-peddling. Now that a Republican sat in the White House, Democrats smelled blood. A House subcommittee looked into the affair.

Adams, who later admitted “mistakes in judgment,” said he never intended to do anything to help the friend who gave him the coat. Goldfine eventually went to jail for tax evasion and was fined $110,000.

At first, Eisenhower defended him. In a televised statement, he called Adams “imprudent.”

“But I like him and I need him,” Eisenhower said.

It wasn’t enough. The press went into a feeding frenzy, bringing pressure on the White House to fire Adams.  Time magazine reported,

Privately, bitterly. Dwight Eisenhower described it as “the most hurtful, the hardest, the most heartbreaking decision” of his 5½ years in office. The decision: to ask for the resignation of hard-bitten little Sherman Adams, Assistant to the President, next to Ike the most powerful man in the Administration, and the only person of whom Dwight Eisenhower had ever said, “I need him.”

Sherman Adams supervising construction of Loon Mountain.

Sherman Adams Goes Back to the Slopes

Adams returned to New Hampshire and began building Loon Mountain Ski Resort. He had skied avidly since he was 17, and the demise of the logging industry was hurting his hometown of Lincoln.  Adams put on snowshoes and identified ski trails, then supervised construction of 12, along with two lifts and a toilet. He served as president and general manager of Loon Mountain for nearly 20 years.

Well into his 70s, Adams would show up at the office at 6 a.m. and, in the winter, make two-mile ski runs, according to his New York Times obituary. He died of renal failure on Oct. 27, 1986, at the age of 87.

Images: White House By Ad Meskens – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12211575; construction of Loon Mountain By Ericshawwhite – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33190299.

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“Wormley, The Caterer, Dead”

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That’s what The Boston Sunday Globe of Oct. 19, 1884, proclaimed.  James Wormley the proprietor of the famous Wormley Hotel in Washington, D.C., died at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston after unsuccessful surgery to treat his chronic kidney stones.

 

James Wormley

Wormley came to Boston to seek relief from the renowned surgeon Henry J. Bigelow, an early proponent of anesthesia and a pioneer in surgery for vesicle calculus (bladder stones). The Boston-born Bigelow was a graduate of Boston Latin and Harvard and served as a surgeon at Mass General for over 40 years.

Painting of first operation under ether at Mass General. Bigelow is standing third from right.

That Wormley chose Dr. Bigelow and Mass General says a lot about the physician and the institution, which opened its doors in 1821 and has been a national leader in medical advancement ever since.  But it was clear that Wormley was gravely ill when he came to Boston; Dr. Bigelow said his chances of survival were about one in a thousand, according to The Evening Star of Washington, D.C.

Renowned surgeon Henry J. Bigelow of Mass General.

Who Was Wormley?

James Wormley was a Black caterer and hotelier born in Washington, D.C.  His hotel was one of the most elegant and modern in Washington, renowned for its cuisine. It was frequented by the political power brokers of the post-Civil-War period.  It served as the venue of the infamous Compromise of 1877, also known as the Wormley Agreement. The deal settled the disputed presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden by throwing the election to Hayes.  The Republican victory led to the removal of federal troops from the South and the effective end of Reconstruction.

The Wormley Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Wormley was one of the most prominent African Americans in the country during the 1870s and 1880s. An ardent proponent of Black civil rights, he counted among his friends Frederick Douglass and John Mercer Langston, the U.S. minister to Haiti. His sons served in the army and navy during the Civil War.

The Massachusetts Connection

Wormley had many connections to Massachusetts’ political leaders.  U.S. Representative Samuel Hooper from Marblehead helped him purchase his hotel in 1871, acting as a silent partner. In 1884, The Boston Globe reported that Sen. George Frisbee Hoar of Worcester entertained U.S. Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray of Nahant at Wormley’s at the extravagant cost of $100 a plate.

Congressman Samuel Hooper from Marblehead

But his closest relationship was with Sen. Charles Sumner of Boston, the radical Republican.  In 1871, Wormley and Sumner persuaded Congress to fund the first public school for African Americans in Washington, which became known as the Wormley School.  The two became lifelong friends.  In fact, Sumner gave him a gift of his personal copy of the signed 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery.  Wormley was among the attendants as Sumner lay dying after suffering a heart attack in Washington.

Senator Charles Sumner

In May 1884, just five months before his own death, he received “the thanks of the Commonwealth” for the gift of his good friend Charles Sumner’s portrait.  That portrait still hangs today in the Statehouse.

Currier and Ives print, Death of Charles Sumner. Wormley is sitting in chair.

About the Author

James F. Lee is a freelance writer and blogger whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and AAA Tidewater Traveler Magazine. He recently posted Phillis Wheatley’s Boston: Vestiges of the poet’s life remain today. He can be reached at www.jamesflee.com.

SOURCES: Boston Globe Archives, whitehousehistory.org, James Wormley Recognition Project.  IMAGES: James Wormley, Unknown Author Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International — CC BY-SA 4.0; Wormley Hotel, Unknown Author {{PD-US}}; Henry J. Bigelow, Unknown Author https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0015953.html Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0; ether operation painting by Robert C. Hinckley, from the Collection of the Boston Medical Library {{PD-US}}; Samuel Hooper {{PD-US]]; death of Sumner, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, ID cph. 3b50 102 {{PD-US}}.

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New Release: ‘Eat Like a President’ in Paperback and Ebook

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If you really want to know what a president was like, find out what he ate. That’s what Leslie and Dan Landrigan did with the six presidents from New England. The authors wrote the New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President: 30 Recipes from the White House to Your House, which tells you about the presidents’ families, their servants, their friends — and how they struggled to run the White House and the country at the same time.

You’ll find some surprises in Eat Like a President.  Calvin Coolidge, for example, loved to play practical jokes on the servants. Chester A. Arthur indulged in fine dining despite having a fatal kidney disease. John Quincy Adams had a passion for Madeira wine.

Other presidential preferences won’t surprise you. The revolutionary presidential couple, John and Abigail Adams, served distinctly American food. Franklin Pierce, the backwoodsman, preferred comfort food from his native New Hampshire. And Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy loved fancy French cuisine.

The book also explores the historic setting in which the food was made and served. Each president grappled with America’s defining conflicts over freedom and equality. How they treated their servants revealed a lot about their attitudes toward servitude and slavery. Abigail Adams hated the Constitutional compromise that allowed slavery, and she hated watching enslaved servants toiling just outside the White House. She treated her own servants like family. Then, more than a century later, Calvin Coolidge tried to pass an anti-lynching bill and took his ill African American wine steward with him on an Adirondacks vacation to improve his health.

You’ll get a fuller picture of the difficulties a president faces from Eat Like a President. Among pressing cares about war, disaster, legislation and re-election, they still have to meet with hundreds of people every week – and feed many of them. A presidential couple still must host a state dinner even if their child is dying. A president has to spend hours shaking hands even when his enemies are killing his infrastructure bill. In the midst of all that, the first couple has to try to make the White House presentable.

You’ll also get a fuller picture of the presidential couples and their times just from what they ate and drank.  Jane Pierce, a teetotaler, came from a cold roast Boston family, while Franklin, an alcoholic, grew up in a tavern. They didn’t appear together publicly very often.

Calvin Coolidge loved the Vermont pickles of his modest boyhood.  People even said he looked like he was weaned on one. And yet he also enjoyed Chinese food, a cuisine embraced by aspirational middle-class city dwellers. Coolidge was both.

In the reckless 1960s, the Kennedys served tumblers of Cuba Libres at their White House Twist parties. Those were prosperous times, and the Kennedys — Jackie especially — spent lavishly. At one party they served 10 pounds of caviar in a gold bucket.

Finally, Eat Like a President describes where the presidents ate – in the White House. The first couples had to keep improving the building as America grew in power and prestige. In 1800, Abigail Adams furnished a drafty, unfinished 36-room house; 162 years later, Jackie Kennedy turned a 132-room mansion into an elegant showplace.

In the book…

Let’s face it, food is a fun way to learn about history. And history is a fun way to cook food.

In this book you will get step-by-step instructions on how to make 30 different kinds of presidential food in a modern American kitchen. The foods range from fairly simple colonial fare to fancy French dishes preferred by the Kennedys and the Chinese entrees the Coolidges loved.

You will also get an engaging account of each president’s White House years, with historical background and context. High school students might find it a compelling way to learn about American history — and American cooking.

Just click here to buy the ebook, here for the paperback.

About the authors

Dan and Leslie Landrigan are the authors of the New England Historical Society website. Over the past decade, they’ve written thousands of stories about New England history. They now live on an island in Maine, where they do a lot of cooking for themselves.

This books is the fourth in a series about historic foods. The others are 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods, 29 Historic Apple Recipes: Cooks’ Favorites from 1650 to 1960, and Historic Italian Christmas Cookies, all ebooks available from Amazon.

Love history?

Then you probably want to join the New England Historical Society community by signing up for our e-newsletter, which comes out once a week. Click here to sign up.

 

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Louisa Adams Parties Into the Presidency

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Louisa Adams wanted her husband to be president of the United States. Her husband didn’t have much choice in the matter.  John Quincy Adams grew up believing he would disgrace himself if he didn’t.

“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,” wrote his father, the founding father, John Adams.

In 1824, the time was right for John Quincy to run for president. One man stood in his way: the U.S. Senator from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson.

Louisa Adams tried to help get Jackson out of the way — by throwing a magnificent ball in his honor. Because that’s the way they did it in 1824.

Louisa Adams

Louisa Adams

She met her husband in England in 1790. He was a rising young diplomat, the son of the vice president of the United States. She had been born in London and spent much of her childhood in France as the daughter of a wealthy American merchant and diplomat. The two probably couldn’t have differed more.

She was a charming, fashionable, hot-blooded socialite. He was reserved, taciturn and cold. Louisa described him in a novel:

“a man of extraordinary talents…his natural disposition was ardent and impetuous, but a perpetual watchfulness over these natural defects, had taught him to master them completely, and it was only those who were the most constantly with him, who were aware that occasions could arise in which the internal volcano would sometimes produce an eruption that was short but violent in its explosion. “

They married in 1797. Around the time of the wedding, Louisa’s father told John Quincy he had lost most of his money. Financial troubles plagued the Adamses for the rest of their lives.

Louisa followed her husband to his diplomatic postings in Russia, Ghent and London. During their marriage she had 15 pregnancies and delivered three sons and a daughter, who died in infancy.

Back to the USA

In 1817, President James Monroe appointed John Quincy Adams secretary of state. They moved to Washington, D.C., and eventually bought the house Monroe had lived in on F (now I) Street.

The house that James Monroe and John Quincy Adams lived in.

By 1824, Monroe neared the end of his term, which gave John Quincy Adams a chance  to run for president. He knew he’d probably face Jackson, a war hero, for the prize.

Adams and Jackson had little in common other than their age (57), their ambition and their early promise. Adams’ career as a diplomat began at 14, when he went to St. Petersburg to work as secretary to the U.S. minister to Russia, Francis Dana. Jackson began his career as a soldier at the age of 13, when he volunteered to fight in the American Revolution for the local militia.

Andrew Jackson

In 1824, men did not campaign for president the way they do today. There was no gladhanding the public, no caucuses or primaries. In six of the 24 states, legislators cast the vote for president. And in all the states, only white male adults could go to the polls.

Politicians shunned retail politics. Instead, they played social politics, appealing to political power brokers in their own parlors.

It was not something Adams was good at.  Jackson, on the other hand, was. Dashing and tempestuous, he had won enormous  popularity after winning the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.

Louisa Adams made up for her husband’s shortcomings. She had shone as a diplomat’s wife and a society hostess. She threw herself into Washington’s social whirl, hosting dinners and levees at their F Street mansion for people important to her husband’s career.

john-quincy-adams-president

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

Louisa Adams’ Ball to End All Balls

Louisa held a grand ball on Jan. 8, 1824, the ninth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. The purpose of the party was ostensibly to honor Jackson, but really to eclipse him. On the social front, Jackson’s backwoods wife, Rachel, couldn’t hope to compete with the worldly Louisa. Plus, by “honoring” Jackson, the Adamses hoped to win his endorsement for president. They might even persuade him to run as vice president.

Louisa invited a thousand people to the house on F Street, so many they had to remove all the furniture and doors. They even built pillars to keep the floor from caving in. Louisa filled the house with flowers, hired the marine band and served a lavish buffet.

The party was a smash, Louisa a legend. People talked about it for days. The National Republican printed a poem in her honor, which ended,

Belles and matrons, maids and madams,

All are gone to Mrs. Adams.

They continued to go to Mrs. Adams. In March, her husband recorded they’d had 235 visitors in their home that month alone.

The prize

Jackson still ran against Adams for president, and he even won the popular vote in a three-way Electoral College tie. The election then went to the House of Representatives.

Adams beat Jackson by making a deal with Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House. After Clay threw the election to Adams, Adams made Clay his secretary of state.

Drawing of the President’s House by Benjamin Latrobe

That enraged Jackson, who accused Adams of making a corrupt bargain. Jackson was already furious with Adams’ supporters because they had attacked Rachel. He resigned his Senate seat and almost immediately launched a grassroots campaign to defeat Adams for reelection. Jackson and his supporters would make the next four years the most miserable of John Quincy and Louisa Adams’ lives.

Images: Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, Architect. The White House “President’s House” Washington, D.C. South front elevation / Jan. , B H Latrobe. Washington D.C, 1817. Jan. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001698953/. Adams house By APK – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117668495. With thanks to Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams by Louisa Thomas.

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Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

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Nothing cheered Abigail Adams so much as a wedding. During her lifetime of difficulty and sadness, she needed cheering. Her husband was often absent, a beloved son died young, a daughter lost a battle with breast cancer, another son became a dissolute alcoholic. Through it all, her family and servants came to view her as Abigail Adams, matchmaker.

She thought of her servants as family, kept their secrets and hosted their marriage ceremonies. She married off six pairs of them, five of them in her own home.

In 1801, that meant the White House.

1793 plans for the White House by James Hoban

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

Abigail’s nephew, William Smith Shaw, knew how much she loved weddings. “I declare I wish you would have, Aunt, a wedding every night in the week, for I plainly see that it gives you better spirits and consequently better health, than all the medicine in the world,” he wrote to her in 1798.

“I am a great friend to Matrimony, and always like to promote it, where there is a prospect of happiness & comfort,” she replied.

william-smith-shaw-stuart

Portrait of William Smith Shaw by Gilbert Stuart.

She had just hosted the wedding of her servant Abigail Hunt and a local farmer, Ebenezer Harmon, at her farm in Quincy, Mass.  “I regaled them with a Glass of wine, & some cake and Cheese,” she wrote. Then she went to bed as the wedding party went off dancing. “I retired to rest at about nine, and with the pleasurable reflection of having made Several honest families happy & pleasd I enjoyd a comfortable nights repose.”

John Adams heartily approved of Abigail’s matchmaking among the servants. “I hope you will marry Louisa & Betcy Howard and all the single ones, who are ripe,” he wrote to her from Philadelphia in 1798.

The First Wedding

In 1784, Abigail Adams made her first match. John Adams was then serving as minister to Great Britain and she was about to sail for London to join him. She hired John Briesler, a local man, to accompany her across the Atlantic. Before she left, she wrote to her husband about him . She called Briesler “a steady frugal fellow, with a mind much above the vulgar.” The Adamses came to depend on Briesler. “As good a servant as ever bore the name,” she later wrote. If it hadn’t been for him, she wrote years later, she never would have gone into public life. He was “virtuous, handy and attentive.”

Briesler was especially attentive to Abigail’s 23-year-old ladies’ maid, Esther Field. In 1788, just a few weeks before they were to return to America, Esther came to Abigail in much distress. She confessed Briesler had gotten her pregnant.

“[P]oor Brisler looks so humble and is so attentive, so faithfull & so trust worthy, that I am willing to do all I can for them,” Abigail wrote to her sister, Mary Cranch.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-portrait

Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart

Abigail Adams, matchmaker, got them married a few days later in St. Marylebone church in London. Abigail worried about Esther delivering the baby aboard the ship returning home. She arranged for a nurse to come with them to help with the childbirth. The baby, a girl, was born aboard the ship. “We got through this business much better than I feared we should. I had for the first time in my life, to dress the little animal,” she wrote to her daughter.

Over the years, Esther had more babies. Abigail, however, found ways to keep her employed.

In 1797, she hosted the wedding of another servant, Polly Doble Howard, and Jonathan Baxter, Jr.

The White House

Abigail had managed the farm and family during her husband’s long absences. She engineered the moves to join him. She set up official houses in London and Paris on his diplomatic missions; to New York when he served as vice president of the United States and to Philadelphia as president. Then, three years into his presidency she had to set up another house. This time, she did it in the Wilderness City – Washington, D.C. – where the seat of government had moved.

It was November 1800. Abigail was 56 years old and not looking forward to the move. She had stayed at her Quincy farm fighting off raging fevers as her husband fought off his political enemies. He moved into the President’s House a few weeks earlier than she.

John Briesler was with him. Abigail had also sent William Shipley ahead of her to help. Another of John Adams’ servants was also probably in Washington: Richard Dexter, an “honest and faithful domestick” who handled horses.

abigail-adams-attacked-thoas-jefferson

John Adams by Gilbert Stuart

White House Wedding

A week before Abigail was to leave for Washington, she sent two of her housemaids ahead. John Adams had called the White House “habitable,” but that may have been charitable. The staircases hadn’t been finished, the plaster hadn’t dried on the wall and none of the rooms had been furnished.

Rebecca Tyrell was one of the maids Abigail sent ahead. Rebecca had worked for Abigail since 1790 and nursed her through various illnesses. Abigail viewed her almost as a daughter.  She called Rebecca “my most beloved domestic who was to me as a child in sickness and in Health.”

Betsy Howard went with Rebecca. She was Polly Doble Howard’s sister, and one of the domestics John Adams considered “ripe.” She would sleep on the same floor of the President’s House as Abigail and John Briesler. Their rooms, wrote Abigail, were as “handsome and well-furnishd as any of my Bed chambers at Quincy.”

The other servants slept along the ground floor corridor, in the basement.

So why did Betsy Howard get special treatment? “[F]or Many reasons I chose to have her under my own Eye,” wrote Abigail to her doctor, Cotton Tufts.

Abigail was probably worried that Betsy might find herself in the same position as Esther Field had 16 years earlier. Or maybe she had.

In January 1801, Betsy Howard married William Shipley in the President’s House.

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker Twice More

Abigail Adams spent only four months in the cold, unfinished White House, where she had famously hung her washing to dry in the East Room.

Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, would observe, “there is something in the climate and habits of this place very hostile to the happiness of New Englanders.” She and John had, in fact, been miserable in the White House.

Two weeks after Abigail Adams arrived in Washington, their son Charles died, a homeless alcoholic, in New York City. Two weeks after that they would learn John had lost the presidential election. During that time they had only 13 servants to do the work of 30 – furnishing the big house, hosting official entertainments and keeping the fires going to dry the plaster.

Abigail left Washington happily in February 1801. “My residence in this city has not served to endear the world to me. I am sick, sick and sick of Publick life,” she wrote as she left.

Peacefield, the Adams home in Quincy

She wasn’t sick of matchmaking. In 1802, Elizabeth Epps and Tilly Whitcomb married at the Adams’ farm in Quincy.

Rebecca Tyrell stayed with Abigail another three years after they left Washington. John Adams had brought Richard Dexter back with him to Quincy. In 1804, Rebecca Tyrell married him at the Adams farm. Abigail would remember Rebecca in her will, bequeathing her $30 and a gown.

After the ceremony, Abigail Adams, matchmaker, bragged of her love matches to her friend, Hannah Phillips Cushing.

“At the Wedding,” Abigail continued, “amongst other Guests were six couple who had lived with me during her residence with me all of whom had been married from me in that period & all but one married in my family. This I believe is rather a singular instance.”


 

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