Adams Resting Place
1306 Hancock Street,
Quincy, MA
John, Abigail, John Quincy and Louisa Adams are entombed beneath the ground floor of the United First Parish Church in Quincy, Massachusetts. This church, also known as the "Stone Temple" and "Church of the Presidents," is architecturally one of the finest houses of worship in New England. It illustrates a transition in style from Georgian and Federal to Greek Revival.
Designed and built in 1827-28 by architect-engineer Alexander Parris and financed primarily by John Quincy Adams, the First Parish Church was constructed of blue granite from nearby quarries and represents one of the earliest uses of native granite as a building material in the United States. Parris altered the basic Georgian and Federal design by adding to the front a broad, pedimented portico supported by four massive Doric columns a feature that augured the popularity of Greek Revival architecture. The columns, 25 feet long and weighing 25 tons each, were hauled by oxen teams from the quarries to the construction site.
In 1828 the remains of John Adams, who had died 2 years earlier, and of his wife Abigail, who had passed away before her husband, were removed from Hancock Cemetery and placed in a crypt beneath the vestibule in the basement of the church. In 1852 the bodies of John Quincy Adams, who had passed away 4 years before, and his wife, Louisa Catherine, who succumbed in 1852, were interred in the same crypt. The only other church in the Nation containing the tomb of a President, that of Woodrow Wilson, is the Washington Cathedral (Episcopal), in Washington, D.C.