which sheltered, among other delicate ornaments, three successive Dorothy Quincys. There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks, Sewalls—to mention only a few of the Quincy connections—and what, indeed, becomes of New England?
The Quincy Homestead
It is perhaps impolite to compare a Massachusetts family tree to a banyan instead of the conventional elm, but no prowler among her old houses can come away without a feeling that almost everything in New England is related to almost everything else. Chicago glances over Boston’s shoulder and finds her reading the Monday Transcript’s genealogy page; Chicago howls with laughter and turns to Vanity Fair to see what is going on in New York. Boston is momentarily interrupted, doesn’t know quite what Chicago is laughing at, returns a well-bred smile of complete detachment, and plunges back into the genealogy page.
This business of keeping track of marriages and deaths, cousinships and children-by-the-second-wife is serious, though bred of no spirit of arrogance, no desire to find a coat of arms for the door of the new town-car. There is brisk mental exercise in chasing an obscure ancestor to his lair and finding that he was what you thought he was when you started out, and not his own grand-nephew-twice-removed. Further, reasons Boston, unless you know to whom a person is related, how can you know to whom that person is related? By this sound process of logic a personal news item in a Boston newspaper worth six agate lines of white paper is so interestingly overgrown with eighteen or twenty lines of genealogical wistaria that the outsider has some trouble peering through the vines to the item itself. He will never understand the irrelevant matter until he understands that it is not irrelevant, that the ever-present landmarks of tradition are bristling with precedents, and that the respect for those precedents is so congenital that they guide the footsteps of New Englanders more than even New Englanders suspect.[A]
[A] I am told by Mr. George Stephenson, of the Transcript, that the bulk of special subscription to the genealogical issues comes from the Middle West. Again brutal statistics blunder in to shatter a pleasant theory. I repeat this to a Boston beldame; she says, “Why of course—those subscribers are from families who migrated west to make money, and now, of course—” and leaves me to fill out the sentence. My theory stands, and defies the lightnings.
If the foreigner from beyond the Hudson or the Delaware or the Mississippi will do himself the favor of visiting the Quincy house, he will sense the point, and be paid in full measure by the contemplation of a house with a varied and engaging story.
It began life as a Puritan farmstead, by a brookside in the town of Braintree. Sixteen years after the first settlement at Plymouth, and therefore nearly three centuries ago, William Coddington built three rooms on a kitchen. Bigoted public opinion soon broke up the trio of liberals who used to sit and talk free worship before the great fireplace in that kitchen—Coddington fled, Sir Harry Vane went other ways, and Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony. Edmund Quincy, the new owner, came out from Boston, with a retinue of six servants. Such a staff was a rare luxury in those ascetic days. It is partially explained by the fact that in an age of large families Edmund Quincy’s was no exception, and four children wanted a lot of looking after. He enlarged the house to accommodate his growing tribe, and about 1685 gave up the Coddington structure to his slaves, while he built a new house a few rods away. (It was this Edmund’s sister who married the master of the Mint, John Hull; he named Point Judith after her, and their daughter Hannah was the maiden who was given in marriage with a dowry of her weight in pine-tree shillings—one hundred and twenty-five pounds avoirdupois and five hundred sterling.)
Another Edmund, the third of the American line and the second in possession of the estate on Quincy Brook, fell heir to it when his father died in 1698. Through his grandmother Edmund was already related to the line which was presently to bring forth John Adams. His thirteen brothers and sisters and numerous cousins connected him by marriage with nearly all the families of the settlement, and out of one of those ceremonies is left to us a glimpse of tragedy: Judge Sewall records in his diary that just after “Cousin Daniel” was being married to Mrs. Shepard, when the guests were singing in the hall, one of them dropped dead. Her body was carried to the room which was to have been the bride’s, “the Bridegroom and Bride ... going away like Persons put to flight in Battel” to spend their honeymoon at a neighbor’s house.
Edmund the Third was a man not only of fortune but of discrimination, which he showed by marrying Dorothy Flynt—the first “Dorothy Q.” In 1706 he invited the whole countryside to the estate by the brook, and around and above the old Coddington house the whole corps of neighbors, abetted by hard cider, raised the huge timbers of a new mansion, the one which stands there today restored to its full dignity. It was a suitable dwelling for a man of eminence in the colony, a man big enough to quarrel with Benning Wentworth over the boundary of New Hampshire. On the rear of the new home he built an extension containing a bedroom and a study, where “Tutor” Flynt, Mrs. Quincy’s brother, could find rest from his duties in Harvard College, and there Tutor Flynt spent most of a crusty, tobacco-perfumed bachelor life as a sort of paying guest, driving down to Braintree from Cambridge in a calèche for week-ends and the longer holidays. (Tutor Flynt, by the way, is the earliest recorded user of the “If-you-are-going-to-Heaven-I-don’t-want-to-go-there” joke, though genuine research would doubtless reveal that Shem made the same remark to Japheth one afternoon when the Ark lay becalmed.)
The light of the household was Dorothy Q, and the source of her radiance was her family of growing children. Three of them claim our attention: Edmund (the Fourth), who inherited the Homestead; Josiah (the first of a series of notable Josiahs); and a second Dorothy, whom her grandson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, described in this way: