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The Quincy Mansion, Quincy, Massachusetts: Dorothy

The oldest child of this generation was Edmund, whose daughter, Dorothy Quincy, married John Hancock, while the fourth child was Dorothy Quincy, the great-grandmother of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The continuity of life at the mansion was sadly broken when, within a year, the grandmother, the mother, and the father died. The death of the latter occurred in England, where he had gone on business for the colony. When news came of the ending of his life, the General Court of Massachusetts declared that "he departed the delight of his own people, but of none more than the Senate, who, as a testimony of their love and gratitude, have ordered this epitaph to be inscribed on his tomb in Bunhill Fields, London." For a year Dorothy Quincy remained in the house; but on her marriage the place ceased for a time to be the chief residence of a Quincy. Edmund was in business in Boston. He resorted to the house for a season now and then, but his Boston home remained his permanent abiding place until after the birth of his daughter Dorothy. Then failing fortune sent him back to the ancestral home.

During the next few years John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock were favored visitors at the mansion. John Hancock won Dorothy Quincy for his bride, and family tradition says that preparations were made for the wedding in the old home. "The large north parlor was adorned with a new wall paper, express from Paris, and appropriately figured with the forms of Venus and Cupid in blue, and pendant wreaths of flowers in red," writes the author of "Where American Independence Began." But the approaching Revolution interfered. The bridegroom hurried away to IN THE LAND OF THE PILGRIMS Boston and then to Lexington. Dorothy, under the care of Mrs. Hancock, the mother of John Hancock, also went to Lexington on April 18, 1775, the very day when Paul Revere aroused the patriots, and Hancock was once more compelled to flee for his life. Four months later, at Fairfield, Connecticut, the lovers were married. The old mansion was never again the home of the Quincys. Josiah, brother of Edmund the fourth, built for himself in 1770 a beautiful home not far from the family headquarters. Here he lived through the war.

Visitors to the house are shown on one of the windows the record he made of the departure of the British from Boston Harbor, scratched there when he saw the welcome sight, on October 17, 1775. For much more than a century the house was in the hands of other families, but, fortunately, it has come under the control of the Colonial Dames of Massachusetts. They have made it the historic monument it deserves to be. The visitors who are privileged to wander through the rooms hallowed by the presence of men and women who helped to pave the way for American independence read with hearty appreciation the lines which Holmes addressed to the portrait of his ancestress, "My Dorothy Q," as he called her: "Grandmother's mother: her age, I guess Thirteen summers, or something less; Girlish bust, but womanly air; Smooth, square forehead, with uprolled hair; Lips that lover has never kissed, Taper fingers and slender wrist; Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade; So they painted the little maid."

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