Quincy Historical Society in 1893 and Today
On Monday evening, October 16, 1893, at the Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy Historical Society met for the first time. Charles Francis Adams, Jr.—grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams—as Society president gave the principal speech.
The 1890s were a great decade for the founding of historical organizations and for beginning efforts at historic preservation. Time was on everyone’s mind. The nation was now more than a decade past its Centennial celebration. The soldiers who fought the great Civil War—including Mr. Adams—were entering late middle age. A new century approached. In Quincy, in addition, the centennial of its formation as a separate town had taken place in 1892, and a few years earlier, in 1888, it had officially ceased to be a town and had become a city. Quincy, like much of the nation, knew it was experiencing rapid and permanent change.
Thankfully, the founders of Quincy Historical Society did not shrink from the prospect of change. Women and members of the burgeoning Irish community figured prominently in it from the start. (Other immigrant groups were just beginning to arrive.) Nevertheless, the Society’s concept of local history would take time to evolve.
From Mr. Adams’ speech on that first night, it seems that the Society was primarily interested in the earliest portions of the community’s history and saw its role as a rather passive one of preservation: “Unquestionably, in the sister towns constituting Old Braintree there are many records which may yet be collected and preserved . . .. Once establish the historical receptacle and historical matter is sure to gather into it.”
Apparently, this approach turned out to be spectacularly unsuccessful. In 1904 the Society re-evaluated and concluded, based on their experience, that “a purely literary association of the old type, devoted to local antiquarianism, would not be supported by the public.” But they saw a light: “a field for usefulness” for “a modern historical society” that “would participate in popular education by putting history before the people in a shape that would be both serious and attractive.” This has been the Society’s goal ever since.
The Society changed its view not only on how to present history but on what history would be presented. The scope of the subjects in Quincy’s history we would embrace expanded over the decades far beyond the colonial and Revolutionary periods. It came to include much of the industrial and business history, educational, and cultural history through the 20th century. A long-time leader of the Society, H. Hobart Holly once commented on the richness and the diversity of its history: “Any one of Quincy’s historic sites could serve as the historical focal point of a community.”
Today, the Historical Society remains committed to telling Quincy’s history in new ways and also to telling new parts of Quincy’s history. For all the work that has been done, there are great sections of Quincy history still to be preserved and to be told.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., would have recognized this. In his life he sought not only to preserve the past, but to make it serve the future, for instance when he became a leader of the new movement for conservation and environmentalism and saved the Blue Hills for posterity.
Ironically, Adams, a couple of years before he gave the speech at the Thomas Crane Library, wrote the last truly comprehensive history of Quincy. The Historical Society accepts the implicit challenge to write the chapters that carry the story forward.
