On March 6, 2010, Leah
Walczak led ENC's
Critical Readings in History class on a tour of the Josiah Quincy
House. Walczak
is Museum Operations Manager for Historic New England.
She
provided a great deal of insight on the Quincy family, the story of the
house, the material culture of the late colonial era, and
the history of the
surrounding area. Professor Randall Stephens interviewed Walczak
after the tour.
Walczak stressed the long history of the house. It's had a
storied past that extends from Revolutionary days, through the
19th-century, and up to the present.
Samuel Adams Drake made a
visit to the Josiah Quincy Mansion in 1875, when it had passed the
century mark. He reported on his excursion in Appleton's Journal:
"The house was built in 1770, by Colonel Josiah Quincy, of Braintree,
on the ground purchased of the local Indian sagamore, as early as 1635,
by Edmund Quincy, of England. The estate has ever since remained
unalienated.
When I happened to be rambling in the neighborhood, I found hospitable
welcome at the old mansion from the daughters of Josiah Quincy,
President of Harvard College. . . .
When I was fairly within the house, which is furnished as houses were
furnished a century ago--where antique-dressed portraits looked down
from the walls, and where sedan-chairs in cool corridors invited to
post-prandial naps--I felt that modern life had little right to intrude
itself into such a place."
